By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Evgeny Dobrenko (lead image, left) is a letter-perfect demonstration of several things he appears, despite years of learning at universities from Odessa to Durham (North Carolina) and Sheffield (Yorkshire), not to have heard of.   In the academic world, like any other business, it’s the money which does the talking, pays […]

by Editor - Tuesday, November 23rd, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Remember the ten plagues of Pharaonic Egypt – the Israelites capitalised and made their getaway to a happy ending. The story has turned into several blockbuster movies and tons of popcorn have been consumed watching them.    There have been two plagues on the Russian film industry, but one is permanent, […]

by Editor - Thursday, November 18th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Russian poets are hardly the only ones to think they are irresistible on account of what comes out of their mouths. The two I’ve known best, Yevgeny Yevtushenko (lead image, right) of Irkutsk and Ted Hughes of Yorkshire, were irrepressible on the point, which helps account for some of the fatuities […]

by Editor - Tuesday, November 16th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with On November 7-8, this website published a report on what the indictment of Igor Danchenko by the US Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Special Counsel John Durham didn’t mean, and what consequences it was unlikely to have.  The title was: Does the US Government really intend […]

by Editor - Sunday, November 14th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with British government officials. state prosecutors,  and police have lied repeatedly in announcements over the past three years that they have issued European Arrest Warrants charging three Russian military officers with attempted murder using the Novichok chemical weapon against targets in England. The three Russians have been named in official British press […]

by Editor - Thursday, November 11th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with There are two kinds of lies about Russia. Not white or black; neither the Big Lie nor the small one. Those are differences between what’s true and what’s false. In our war-fighting world the real difference between lies is whom you tell your Russia lie to. This is according to the US […]

by Editor - Tuesday, November 9th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with When David Cornwell (aka John Le Carré) died after a bathroom fall last December, the current chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (aka MI6), Richard Moore, announced by tweet that Cornwell had been “a giant of literature who left his mark on MI6 through his evocative and brilliant novels”.  By mark, […]

by Editor - Sunday, November 7th, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with This is the story of how Vladimir Putin changed his mind on who should own Russia’s most important asset sailing the seven seas. Or did he really? This is also the story of the privatisation of Sovcomflot, the state-owned shipping company and one of the largest fleets of oil and gas […]

by Editor - Wednesday, November 3rd, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The Russia bunker-buster information bomb, Catherine Belton’s (lead image) Putin’s People, proved to be a dud at a London ceremony last week.  In its award for the best non-fiction book about Russia for 2020, Pushkin House announced the winner was a retiring Oxford don whose “long and distinguished career” had displayed […]

by Editor - Monday, November 1st, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The Russian intelligentsia, their hangers-on, oligarchs, and Navalnyites have always suffered from a cultural cringe. The grass is greener on the other side of the Russian border, they think, and for obvious reasons – though they aren’t the same for each of the cringing elites.   So when the political tide […]

by Editor - Wednesday, October 27th, 2021
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