by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with In the last war which the Americans, British, and French fought against the Russians, they were all defeated and forced to run away. Now it’s happening again. But if Anna Reid, author of a new history of the Allied powers’ invasion of Russia and war against the Bolsheviks,  titles her book […]

by Editor - Monday, April 22nd, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with When a man is drowning, he reportedly sees excerpts from his life story flashing in review in the two minutes it takes for his lungs to fill up with water, stopping the heart and cutting off the oxygen supply to his brain. When an Italian writer recently attempted over two hundred […]

by Editor - Wednesday, January 24th, 2024
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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 […]

by Editor - Sunday, November 26th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with In the very long history of men and women who snatch defeat from the jaws of victory; miss the forest for the trees; and turn a molehill of profit into a mountain of loss, the US, British and German attempt to stop the tankers which carry Russian oil and gas […]

by Editor - Sunday, September 17th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with What’s the truth of how Putin rules Russia?   The longest-serving foreign correspondent in Russia has followed Putin since their first meeting in St Petersburg in November 1991. This is the Putin story which has taken more than thirty years to prepare. It’s the story which the western and Russian […]

by Editor - Monday, September 4th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Doctors in hospitals for the criminally insane have reported that the sharpest pain patients with superiority complexes suffer is the belief there are others who are more superior than they are. Unless they are stopped, they kill to cure. US exceptionalism is a disease of this type.  The American exceptionalists […]

by Editor - Sunday, September 3rd, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with “He was not a nihilist for nothing!” This is one of the funniest, and at the same time one of the saddest lines written by Ivan Turgenev in Fathers and Sons, the novel of his which preserves its contemporaneity through the Russian revolutions better than any other classic of Russian […]

by Editor - Sunday, May 28th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with This is a tale about whales and Russians. In the telling, it has surprised even its author. A university professor from Oregon, he belongs to that seagoing pod which, like the North Pacific right whales,    is a seriously endangered species right now — that’s the American exceptionalists. Ryan Tucker Jones’s book, […]

by Editor - Wednesday, May 17th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The pro-war English writers supporting the arming of the Ukrainians with depleted uranium ammunition* have no brains. The anti-war English writers opposing depleted uranium ammunition have no spines. Has the kingdom of the English ever been so self-deluded on the page and so depleted on the battlefield?   Yes once, […]

by Editor - Tuesday, May 9th, 2023
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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 […]

by Editor - Monday, April 24th, 2023
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