By John Helmer, Moscow

If you are just back from the beach with your sachel of books dog-eared, riddled with beach sand, even read to the finish, you may have missed the latest in this year’s crop of thrillers with Russians for villains. Mark Mills’s House of the Hanged was released in July. The Independent newspaper of London, owned since March by ex-KGB man Alexander Lebedev, claims this is the author’s “best work in an already accomplished career.”

A few weeks earlier, Chris Morgan Jones’s Agent of Deceit had a paid-up state-owned Russian oligarch in the seat of villainy, with the fear of Imperial Russia Revived the touchstone of a plot that tied British journalists, London due diligence investigators, and MI6 on the same side (Good).
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by John Helmer - Sunday, September 4th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Nostradamus, the 16th century French sage, doesn’t get the credit he deserves for his recipe for the Black Plague. He recommended swift removal of infected corpses; fresh air; clean water; and drinking copious amounts of Vitamin C in rose-hip tea. He was also against the then customary practice of bleeding patients.

The beak in his outfit was filled with aromatic herbs for staunching the putrid air. But the mortality rate among plague doctors was high; most survived by running away from their patients. To keep them on the job, municipalities used to offer them four times the going rate for conventional doctors.
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by John Helmer - Sunday, September 4th, 2011
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Dmitry Rybolovlev’s interest in acquiring US assets is well-known in part because he paid the highest price in American history for a house. Take the tour.

Compared to the asking price of $125 million and the transaction price of $95 million, Rybolovlev got a 24% discount. But the asset value of the house has done poorly compared to Rybolovlev’s Uralkali shares. The assessed value of the Miami property dropped about 40% in the twelve months since he bought it.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, September 1st, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Oleg Deripaska has reached an agreement with President Alpha Conde to end the claims of the Guinean Government against United Company Rusal, Guinean sources report from Conakry. The terms of settlement remain secret; some of them are expected to be announced publicly soon.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, August 31st, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Just over three months after an incident at the Sofitel Hotel, at 45 West 44th Street, New York, resulted in the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the transformation of the French presidential election race, not to mention the management of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the New York City prosecutor, Cyrus Vance Junior, has dropped all charges. He has requested and obtained dismissal of the indictment of Strauss-Kahn, and impugned the credibility of the chamber-maid charging Strauss-Kahn on almost every claim published in the case.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, August 31st, 2011
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, August 31st, 2011
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Marshal Sergei Fyodorovich Akhromeyev

 

“Everything I have worked for throughout my life is being destroyed.”

 

— August 24, 1991

by John Helmer - Wednesday, August 31st, 2011
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Soooo! much choice
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by John Helmer - Friday, August 5th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

One thing isn’t clear about this story, and that’s whether the dog is old, and the trick is new, or vice versa. Another thing isn’t clear – and that’s whether there are any dogs at all in this story, from the point of view of a public prosecutor.

The tale concerns a piece of Moscow real estate which once belonged to the great state of Hungary, and which, despite its notorious, ancient and current hostility towards the great state of Russia, sold the asset to the federal government for the Ministry of Regional Development — at a price far below what the most implacable Russian-hating Hungarian would consider to be fair value.
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by John Helmer - Friday, August 5th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Among the Russian steel oligarchs, none is better educated in his specialty than Vladimir Lisin, who wrote his PhD thesis on metallurgical engineering and another doctoral thesis for a DSc in economics. But you don’t have to put that much study under your belt to understand how an electric arc furnace makes new steel out of melted scrap.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011
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