By John Helmer in Moscow The English comedian, and co-founder of the Goons, Spike Milligan, once said that Americans are the new Germans. He wasn’t exactly joking, but he was being selective. Not every American, he meant, was susceptible to the type of fascism that everyone who has ever been jack-booted by the Germans recognizes. […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, May 10th, 2005
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By John Helmer in Moscow Laundering a man’s reputation is a little like laundering money. The more you churn the facts, the harder it is to remember them; the less damage they can do; and the whiter the outcome. It is for this reason that Russia’s oligarchs have spent so much effort bringing defamation cases […]

by John Helmer - Monday, November 22nd, 2004
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If anyone should know how to rig a constitution, it’s me and George Bush, Jr. You might say it runs in the family. Take my uncle, for example.As the British Empire began to break apart in the aftermath of World War II, he was one of many former military intelligence officers assigned by the imperial […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, September 22nd, 2004
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To what extent is it possible for us to see what lurks behind the faces of Russia’s power elite? Among the exhibits of the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci on display at the Louvre since May, there is a selection of four grotesques by the master. It is said that Leonardo’s keen ability to see […]

by John Helmer - Saturday, July 24th, 2004
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) – Victor Vekselberg has taken so much value out of the Siberian region of Tyumen, it’s understandable that he says he is thinking of putting something back. According to Vekseiberg’s spokesman, Tyumen – the oil-rich region that has been home to one of Vekseiberg’s properties, the Tyumen Oil Company (TNK) – is being […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, July 15th, 2004
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) – At the turn of the last century, when Americans were the conspicuously new oligarchs of the western world F.Scott Fitzgerald was their story-teller. In his novel about a rich young man of upper-class New York, called The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald stuck a warning of his fate as an epigram at the […]

by John Helmer - Monday, July 5th, 2004
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In October of 1812, when Napoleon began his withdrawal from Moscow, the initial mood of the French troops was much more optimistic than we suppose today. Of fighting men, the French army was down to 95,000; but opposing them was scarcely the same number in the surviving Russian army. Buoying the high spirits of the […]

by John Helmer - Friday, June 25th, 2004
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“There are two famous last words,” Charles Bohlen, a US Ambassador to the Soviet Union at the start of the Cold War, once warned. “One is ‘alcohol doesn’t affect me’. The other is ‘I understand the Russians’.” Russians who confidently say they know what the Kremlin is about to do fall into both categories. Russia’s […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, May 25th, 2004
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MOSCOW – Roald Dahl, the English humorist, once wrote a tale about a man who had acquired the secret of seeing through cards. Naturally, he had to conceal it, if he was to make a killing at casinos. As professional gamblers all know, casino managements are constantly on the lookout for players with systems that […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, May 5th, 2004
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MOSCOW – Vladimir Potanin has a plan to cash out somewhere between $3 and $5 billion worth of his fortune in Norilsk Nickel by converting it into a controlling shareholding of the South African mining company, Gold Fields. If he succeeds, he will have achieved a bigger transfer of Russian wealth offshore – beyond the […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, April 28th, 2004
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