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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with When President Vladimir Putin wrote a condolence on the death of Henry Kissinger (lead image), according to the Kremlin communiqué, the president said things in private to Kissinger’s widow which he left unreported to the Russian press.    The Kremlin communiqué says: “Condolences over the passing of Henry Kissinger. Vladimir Putin […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Mistakes are what we are taught to make. Recognizing and correcting them are what we learn on our own. Repeating mistakes after recognizing them for what they are – that’s what a dunce does. In this most intimate of memoirs, John Helmer tells the story of his life, his mistakes and […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Once upon a time, one of the leading literary figures in the UK defended Russian culture by staging a play in a London theatre in 1920 and again in 1926. J.M. (James) Barrie, famous then and now as the creator of Peter Pan, was the playwright; the play he wrote […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Those lighting Mikhail Gorbachev’s funeral pyre are torching the truth of the matter – that Gorbachev was a liar of monumental vanity who betrayed his country out of greed and incompetence, outpointed by his adversaries in Moscow, Washington, and London because they knew him better than he knew himself.

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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with In November 2001—twenty years ago — I gave a lecture in Moscow entitled: “Stealing the Truth – How to Read, and Not to Read, the Press In Russia”. The text has been lost. I am grateful to Ajay Goyal, the organiser of the Hellevig Lectures, for inviting me to bring the […]

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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Elephants are the truly self-knowing creatures of our world. We know this because when they are about to die, they go somewhere no one else can find. It’s the elephantine way of saying they aren’t convinced they are leaving anything behind that’s worth remembering, so in their last act of will, […]

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By Stanislas Balcerac, Warsaw, translated from Polish with illustrations by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven (lead image, right), a former deputy head of the German intelligence agency BND, and more recently the NATO intelligence chief, a newly created post, is now to take over as the new German ambassador in Poland. This is […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The Russian literary intelligentsia doesn’t have a long history – just 200 years of the Russian language in poetry, for example. So it’s to be expected that the writers, including the poets, haven’t had time to overcome the resentment and envy of each other which is still the Russian intelligentsia’s […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Somerset Maugham, the leading story-teller in the Anglo-American market a century ago, said there are three rules for writing a best-seller, but he added: “no one knows what they are.” As unlikely as it is for the profitability of a major line of business to be as unpredictable and irrational […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow Journalism is war by other means. If you don’t understand this you are either an enlisted soldier or a  casualty with a serious head-wound.  On the ground covered by journalism it’s impossible to hide;  innocent civilians are inevitably caught in the cross-fire. Most Russians have known this since the start of […]