By John Helmer in Moscow
It is now official – this month of July is the hottest in Moscow since the Russian Meteorological Service began keeping regular daily records and issuing temperature measurement bulletins. That was back in 1872. Since then the heat-wave years have occurred in 1885, 1920, 1938, 1939, 2001, and 2002.
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By John Helmer in Moscow
Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine (MMK) has just announced that it has abandoned both the Ohio and Oregon steelmill projects in the US, which the company, owned by Victor Rashnikov, has been considering for several years.
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By John Helmer in Moscow
Gennady Onishchenko, the Russian government’s chief health inspector, has issued a new diktat, claiming that bottles of imported wine have been found to contain dibutyl phthalate. There’s a catch, though. Onishchenko’s spokesman refuses to say if he has also banned pencil erasers, plastic toys, and nail polish, all of which have been found by European Union and US inspectors to contain harmful levels of dibutyl phthalate if sucked; they have been banned from consumer sale in those markets for at least five years.
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By John Helmer in Moscow
The truth hurts, speaking musculoskeletically.
Vladimir Potanin (right) usually gives his nerves away when he’s under pressure by the rapid tapping of his foot under the table. Oleg Deripaska (left) shows his nerves, when gulping noises are audible in his throat and he forces a smile.
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By John Helmer in Moscow
It has become the biggest tussle over a shipyard contract ever fought out in public in Russia.
Roman Trotsenko, chief executive of the state-owned United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC), told Fairplay today that negotiations are under way for USC to buy the designs, shipboard technology, and production licences for the building of Russia’s first amphibious landing and helicopter carrier in Russian shipyards.
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By John Helmer in Moscow
There are some memorable accounts of returns and arrivals in Russia. Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory (1951), for example, remembers his return from university in England, when, as he wrote, the sound of the snow and ice crystals crackled under his feet as he stepped off the train at St. Petersburg.
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By John Helmer in Moscow
When US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presided at the original button ceremony in Geneva on March 6, 2009, on the button she presented Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was written the word, in Latin letters, PEREGRUZKA. In Russian, that doesn’t mean RESET, as much of the subsequent reporting of the button has suggested. What the button originally meant was OVERLOAD.
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By John Helmer in Moscow
In the history of Russia it has never happened before that the oligarchs would take on the military establishment in a tug of war over billion-dollar assets.
This couldn’t have happened in the past, because asset power and military strength were the same thing — boyars were warlords. Or else the Communist Party commissars kept officers and troops on a very short leash, and Stalin shot those he didn’t like. Russia has come a way since then.
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