Oleg Deripaska is probably too young, and certainly too self-confident, to contemplate those who marked the loss of their power, or their end, with famous last words. Farouk, the last king of Egypt, lived thirteen years after he was deposed, but nothing before, or afterwards, was as memorable as his words on losing his throne. […]

by John Helmer - Monday, April 26th, 2004
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MOSCOW – Nuri Said was the puppet prime minister of Iraq during the 1950s, when the British pulled all the strings in Baghdad. When he was toppled by revolutionary Iraqi officers in 1958, Said’s mangled corpse was dragged through the streets. His end more or less confirmed what he used to say: “You can always […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, April 21st, 2004
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MOSCOW — There are so many different battles now going on for the assets of Yukos, inside the company, between the management and the shareholders, between different shareholders, between Yukos and Sibneft, and between the company and the state authorities, it is easy to mistake the plot. Last week, Yukos CEO Simon Kukes took out […]

by John Helmer - Monday, April 19th, 2004
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MOSCOW – Mikhail Khodorkovsky has all the time in the world to practice his limbo technique. Remember the limbo? that exotic competition on the nightclub floor when Caribbean dancers would try to outdo each other as they swayed under the limbo bar to choruses of “Limbo! Limbo! How lowww can you gohhhh!” This week, Khodorkovsky […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, March 31st, 2004
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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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