by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Vkusville sounds half Russian, half French. Piquant, you might say – пикантный. The name can be translated into English as Taste Town. But for the name of a new chain of food stores this sounds so hackneyed that in your average American or British town you would expect to find there […]

by Editor - Thursday, November 12th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with It’s an old tsarist ploy. When government officials grow fearful of public protests, attacks on the authorities, and rioting, they increase the volume of alcohol for sale but decrease the number of places where drinkers can gather in public. Vodka is the opium of the people: this has been the Russian […]

by Editor - Monday, July 13th, 2020
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By John Helmer, Moscow This is the Bangsamoro banana, and somebody is slipping on it. On April 4 two young business partners, a Russian named Lev Dengov and a Turkmen, Merdan Gurbanov, with no known source of capital or past business record, signed an agreement to invest almost $600 million in the Bangsamoro region of […]

by Editor - Sunday, April 28th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow Alcoholics have ruled Russia in the past, but for the first time in Russian history a producer of alcohol, a winemaker, is running for president in the March election.   Boris Titov, owner of Abrau-Durso whose shares are listed on the Moscow stock exchange, is careful to avoid speaking to the voters […]

by Editor - Monday, January 15th, 2018
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By John Helmer, Moscow President Vladimir Putin is the bee’s knees. There’s noone to beat him, electionwise. But when it comes to feeding Russians the genuine article, Putin’s promise is a honey trap. Naturally, we are talking only of the business of Russian beekeeping, honey production and trade. Eighteen months after Putin listened to a […]

by Editor - Wednesday, November 22nd, 2017
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By John Helmer, Moscow Medovukha, Russia’s fermented honey drink known in English as mead, is at least one thousand years old. If it’s what the Greeks meant by ambrosia, the nectar of the gods, then it is as ancient as wine, Dionysos’s tipple. Whether Rurik the Viking* brought mead with him to ancient Rus, or […]

by Editor - Sunday, October 29th, 2017
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By John Helmer, Moscow Johnny Appleseed, an eighteenth century nurseryman and orchardist, is honoured in his American homeland for being a patriotic soldier in the  war against the British, and for going barefooted in the mission of Jesus Christ to convert the native Indians, whose tribal lands he enriched with apple nurseries.  It’s the job […]

by Editor - Wednesday, June 14th, 2017
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By John Helmer, Moscow The Russian government this week fired a new shot across the bows of New Zealand, one of the Obama Administration’s staunchest allies in the Pacific and on the Ukraine and Syrian warfronts. Starting on Monday next, February 6, imports of New Zealand beef will be banned by the Russian Service for […]

by Editor - Thursday, February 2nd, 2017
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By John Helmer, Moscow A lucky man can stumble upon a treasure, runs an old Russian proverb; an unlucky one can’t even find a mushroom. If he does find a mushroom, Lewis Carroll’s account of Alice in Wonderland added a problematic choice: eating one side of the mushroom may dwarf you; eating the other may […]

by Editor - Sunday, May 29th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow The privations of war and the taste for oysters don’t usually go in the same direction. Two years into the new war, the problem now for Russian oyster farmers is that if they aren’t careful, they may harvest not just plenty of home-grown oysters to replace imports within a year or […]

by Editor - Tuesday, May 17th, 2016
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