If Anatoly Chubais ever had scruples, or reluctance at setting them aside, he has understood the lesson offered by that arch-plotter, the Marquise de Merquise in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the pre-revolutionary French classic, who advised: “the best way of overcoming scruples is to leave those who have them with nothing more to lose.” In Chubais’s […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004
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Picasso was late for dinner at Gertrude Stein’s in Paris in 1907, when Alice B. Toklas said to him, after the painter had been seated beside her, that she liked his portrait of Stein on the wall above them very much. To which Picasso famously replied: “Everybody says that she does not look like it. […]

by John Helmer - Friday, January 30th, 2004
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Napoleon’s Foreign Minister – Charles-Maurice Talleyrand-Perigord – once said that a man has been given eyes in the front of his head so that he can look forward, instead of backward. When Napoleon discovered that Talleyrand was betraying him to his enemies, Napoleon told him to his face he was “so much shit in a […]

by John Helmer - Saturday, December 20th, 2003
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Earlier this year respectable western newspapers told their readers that Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man, was a close neighbour of President Vladimir Putin’s. This bit of geography was a plant from Khodorkovsky’s public relations machine, intended to convince those Americans to whom Khodorkovsky was trying to sell his Yukos shares, that Khodorkovsky and Putin […]

by John Helmer - Monday, December 15th, 2003
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MOSCOW – When a man runs for the office of Russian prime minister, he must first learn to crawl. Former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov mistakenly imagined he was on a high horse, when in early October he received a delegation from United States oil company ExxonMobil and allowed his guests to announce publicly that the […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, November 18th, 2003
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MOSCOW – Napoleon Bonaparte was the greatest tactician in European history. Russian President Vladimir Putin needs to understand how similar Russia’s situation, and his own, are to the circumstances facing France, and to Napoleon, when the country was encircled by hostile powers, led by the British; its treasury emptied by corruption and civil war; its […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, November 6th, 2003
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The idea of fiscal justice – that taxes should be paid in proportion to the taxpayer’s means -can produce bloody rebellions and even revolutions. But not in Russia. What then-President Boris Yeltsin did in the 1990s was an old trick he might have cribbed from the histories of the old regimes of France if he […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, October 28th, 2003
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MOSCOW – There’s nothing more ungainly than newspapers, when their sanctimoniousness is aroused, and they try walking with their feet in their mouths. Call this the Duranty phenomenon. Walter Duranty was the New York Times journalist who won a Pulitzer prize, journalism’s highest award in the US, for his reporting on Russia in 1931. Duranty […]

by John Helmer - Monday, October 27th, 2003
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Anatoly Chubais is the biggest factotum in Russia, and an oligarch of sorts, in part because he controls United Energy Systems (UES), the electricity utility on which the profit margins of several other oligarchs depends; and also because he was the government official who rigged the privatization schemes that created the oligarchs’ private wealth. Because […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, October 22nd, 2003
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Russian oil producers, pipelines and ports are certain to be badly hit if the United States forces a regime change in Iraq and, consequently, world oil prices fall sharply. And that’s only scratching the surface of the threat to the Russian economy from an American war on Iraq, and all that would follow. Understanding this […]

by John Helmer - Saturday, October 11th, 2003
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