By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It was almost a century ago that a Chicago adman gave the Kellogg Company the idea of selling breakfast cereal  made of puffed rice by telling children that the rice grains cried out as the spoon scooped them  from the milk towards their mouths – SNAP! CRACKLE! POP! That’s what the rice sang in the radio jingle for what, in the American version, was called Rice Krispies. In the British version it was called Rice Bubbles.

Like popcorn, puffed rice is made by heating the grain under steam pressure. The technology is at least a thousand years old in China. To make it palatable in America, the box is filled with 90% rice, 9% sugar, and a pinch of salt. Without the jingle, though, no child would want it.   

Matt Taibbi (lead images), once a Moscow-based US reporter, has built up an  internet following by snapping, crackling and popping at well-known targets and names, mostly of US government officials and the media reporters who parrot them. His Substack audience is large, lucrative   and also demanding,  but not for Russian or Ukrainian war news, analysis, opinions. Not unless the US president, or his subordinates, or their mouthpieces on the big and small screens are making war-mongering fools of themselves. When they do, their krispies and bubbles turn into Taibbi’s sugar.

When the Russian special military operation began on February 24, Taibbi apologized with a pinch of salt. “My mistake was more like reverse chauvinism, being so fixated on Western misbehaviour that I didn’t bother to take this possibility seriously enough [SNAP!]. To readers who trust me not to make those misjudgements, I’m sorry [CRACKLE!!]. Obviously, Putin’s invasion will have horrific consequences for years to come and massively destabilize the world [POP!!!].”

“I fear there will be more to say soon, but I’ll leave it at that for today. When you’re wrong, you’re wrong, and I was wrong about this.”    

Now eight weeks have gone by, and Taibbi has just announced:  “I believe it’s eventually going to come out that [George W.] Bushian ‘regime change’ is the plan for Russia, by force if necessary”. “Eventually” is the jingle word. The way Taibbi says it, he makes it sound as if he’s making a prediction he’s sure his readers will discover again months, maybe years into the future, when they are getting their subscription renewal invoices and Taibbi is hoping to bank the  earnings.  Predicting for the future what has already happened and been discovered in the past – that’s the new POP!

But Taibbi is still calling what is going on in the Ukraine “Putin’s far more serious invasion”. He hasn’t apologized yet for not explaining to his readers how Putin can “invade” if what the Russian army is doing, Taibbi insists he has now discovered, is defending against the “Bushian regime change plan for Russia by force”.  

If that isn’t puffing rice for breakfast, you can call me W.K. Kellogg.

by Editor - Tuesday, June 7th, 2022
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Anna Akhmatova, the most famous poetess in the Russian language, will be 133 on June 23.

Akhmatova was the nom de plume she chose because her father said his family name would be disgraced by her publishing her poems.  The family name was Gorenko, and she was born in Bolshoi Fontan,  Odessa. A bust memorializes the place to this day; the rule of the city by anti-Russian forces since 2014 has not damaged it. The street leading to the memorial used to be called Ukrainskaya; it was renamed Anna Akhmatova, and still is.  

After her father — a naval engineer from a decorated navy family —   left the family, she lived with her mother, her brother and sister in Evpatoria, in the Crimea. They spent their summer holidays south along the peninsula, around Khersones; and northeast further inland, at the village of Slobidka Shelekhivska in Khmelnytsky oblast, near today’s Moldova border. The house has been turned into the Anna Akhamatova Literary Memorial Museum. No one answers the telephone there these days, but it is otherwise undisturbed.

Between 1905 and 1910 she lived in Kiev and attended Fundukleyevskaya Gymnasium, then the Kiev College for Women. There is a plaque in Old Russian on the wall at Number 7, Zankovetskaya Street, Kiev, to memorialize the time and place. The war has not touched it.

by Editor - Tuesday, June 7th, 2022
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

A German walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender tells him:

“That’ll be 100 euros.”

The German is in shock.

“What do you mean, 100 euros? Yesterday it was only 10!”

“Well today it’s 100.”

“But why 100, dammit?!”

by Editor - Tuesday, June 7th, 2022
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the history of war-fighting in Europe,  what state has waged war when its state treasurer, state banker, and state auditor were opposed to the war; aimed to cut the army off from the money required for troops and weapons; and schemed between themselves to sign terms of capitulation with the state’s enemies?

by Editor - Monday, May 30th, 2022
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Russian regime-change theory motivating US sanctions against the Russian oligarchs is that they will trigger a palace coup in which the oligarchs will arrange a bullet for President Vladimir Putin’s head, and in return the US will give them back the keys to their yachts, mansions, and offshore bank accounts.  

The terms of pain relief and life insurance which the oligarchs are discussing with Putin are different. The oligarchs want to be compensated for what they have lost offshore with an even larger stock of assets onshore, including takeover of exiting foreign companies and privatization of state assets; low-interest Central Bank finance;  import substitution and labour subsidies; tax holidays; postponement of ecological compliance; deregulation; amnesty for past crimes, immunity from prosecution for future ones.  

Secret though the details of their agreement are – must be in time of war – the new shape of the oligarchs’ wealth can begin to be gauged from an initial inventory. As for the new policy pact directing it, it is easier to say what it is not —  it bears no resemblance to the recommendations for nationalization, state planning, ban on foreign investment in hostile states, a high ruble rate to protect against imports, and de-dollarization for exports, which have been proposed by the former Kremlin economic adviser, Sergei Glazyev.   

When President Vladimir Putin announced at his meeting with state officials on May 24,   that he proposes “red tape needs to be scrapped” and “additional adjustments to the regulatory framework”, the phrases were not new. In the war economy, however, they signal deregulation and privatization — more freedom for the oligarchs, not less. When Putin added: “the Russian economy will certainly remain open in the new conditions”, the meaning, at least as the oligarchs are interpreting it, is that the president is promising more freedom from the state, not less.

by Editor - Monday, May 30th, 2022
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Before presidential dementia became fashionable in the US, there was, Russians used to joke, Leonid Brezhnev.

Once on a visit to a hunting lodge not far from Moscow, I was told by the forest ranger that he used to assist in setting up for a Brezhnev shoot. It was very late in Brezhnev’s life, the ranger  said; his job had been to kill the animal and fix it with supports so that Brezhnev might shoot it dead again. I’m not sure my informant was telling the truth. The story was a popular anecdote in Moscow for years, before and after Brezhnev died himself on November 10, 1982.  

In a new biography of Brezhnev by Suzanne Schattenberg, a German university professor , Brezhnev is diagnosed with addiction to sedatives and terminal heart failure in his late years; the sedatives caused the well-known slurring of his speech. Brezhnev did not decline into dementia.

Schattenberg’s book also tries to recover the history of the man from newly available evidence, and salvage him from the jokes. This has caused competitive American academics to make fun of them both – Brezhnev and Schattenberg. According to Yuri Slezkine,* an émigré to California,  “Soviet party leaders tend to get the biographies they deserve…Susanne Schattenberg’s new biography of Brezhnev is almost as bland as its subject.”  Slezkine then retells some of the jokes he remembers from his days as a student in Moscow before concluding it was “bewilderment [which was] represented by Brezhnev’s ‘collective leadership.’”

That’s wrong in the light of Schattenberg’s evidence; discreditably so because Slezkine cannot have come to his conclusion if he had read the book.  

Schattenberg concludes: “today, everyone agrees on Brezhnev’s immense importance for the Soviet Union, After all, he ruled and shaped the country for eighteen years – the second longest time at the helm after Stalin’s thirty years (1924-1953); while Khrushchev only clung to power for eleven (1953-1964). Neither of Brezhnev’s successors [Yury] Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko lasted two years in office before their deaths; within six, Mikhail Gorbachev led the Soviet Union to its demise.”

To those among Russians who judge that Brezhnev should have resigned by 1976 and he would be taken more seriously, and remembered more positively, Schattenberg reveals that in December 1976 and again in April 1979, Brezhnev did propose his resignation and retirement. However, the Politburo refused – for their political reasons (personal ambition, collective succession, state security), not Brezhnev’s.

To understand how Russians older than the age of 50 now remember the peacefulness and optimism of Brezhnev’s time, and the dread of war he helped them to overcome, this book helps. But now that Russians realise they are compelled by their foreign enemies to be at war again, Brezhnev’s history helps to  explain why the hopes those enemies have pinned on Russians less than the age of men like Alexei Navalny (born June 4, 1976) have been doomed to fail from the start.

by Editor - Monday, May 23rd, 2022
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Ukraine war is splitting the communist parties of Europe between those taking the US side, and those on the Russian side.

In an unusual public criticism of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) and of smaller communist parties in Europe which have endorsed the Greek criticism of Russia for waging an “imperialist” war against the Ukraine, the Russian Communist Party (KPRF) has responded this week with a 3,300-word declaration:  “The military conflict in Ukraine,” the party said, “cannot be described as an imperialist war, as our comrades would argue. It is essentially a national liberation war of the people of Donbass. From Russia’s point of view it is a struggle against an external threat to national security and against Fascism.”

By contrast, the Russian communists have not bothered to send advice, or air public criticism of the Cypriot communists and their party, the Progressive Party of Working People (AKEL). On March 2, AKEL issued a communiqué “condemn[ing] Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and calls for an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of the Russian troops from Ukrainian territories….[and] stresses that the Russian Federation’s action in recognising the Donetsk and Luhansk regions constitutes a violation of the principle of the territorial integrity of states.”

 To the KPRF in Moscow the Cypriots are below contempt; the Greeks are a fraction above it.

A Greek-Cypriot veteran of Cypriot politics and unaffiliated academic explains: “The Cypriot communists do not allow themselves to suffer for what they profess to believe. Actually, they are a misnomer. They are the American party of the left in Cyprus, just as [President Nikos] Anastasiades is the American party of the right.” As for the Greek left, Alexis Tsipras of Syriza – with 85 seats of the Greek parliament’s 300, the leading party of the opposition – the KKE (with 15 seats), and Yanis Varoufakis of MeRA25 (9 seats), the source adds: “The communists are irrelevant in Europe and in the US, except in the very narrow context of Greek party politics.”

by Editor - Thursday, May 19th, 2022
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The war plan of the US and the European allies is destroying the Russian market for traditional French perfumes, the profits of the French and American conglomerates which own the best-known brands, the bonuses of their managers, and the dividends of their shareholders. The odour  of these losses is too strong for artificial fresheners.

Givaudan, the Swiss-based world leader in production and supply of fragrances, oils and other beauty product ingredients, has long regarded the Russian market as potentially its largest in Europe; it is one of the fastest growing contributors to Givaudan’s profit worldwide. In the recovery from the pandemic of Givaudan’s Fragrance and Beauty division – it accounts for almost half the company’s total sales — the group reported “excellent double-digit growth in 2021, demonstrating strong consumer demand for these product categories.”    Until this year, Givaudan reveals in its latest financial report, the growth rate for Russian demand was double-digit – much faster than the  6.3% sales growth in Europe overall; faster growth than in Germany, Belgium and Spain.    

Between February 2014, when the coup in Kiev started the US war against Russia, and last December, when the Russian non-aggression treaties with the US and NATO were rejected,   Givaudan’s share price jumped three and a half times – from 1,380 Swiss francs to 4,792 francs; from a company with a market capitalisation of 12.7 billion francs ($12.7 billion) to a value of 44.2 billion francs ($44.2 billion). Since the fighting began in eastern Ukraine this year until now, Givaudan has lost 24% of that value – that’s $10 billion.  

The largest of Givaudan’s shareholders is Bill Gates. With his 14%, plus the 10% controlled by Black Rock of New York and MFS of Boston, the US has effective control over the company.

Now, according to the US war sanctions, trade with Russia and the required payment systems have been closed down, alongside the bans on the importation of the leading European perfumes. So in place of the French perfumers, instead of Givaudan, the Russian industry is reorganizing for its future growth with its own perfume brands manufactured from raw materials produced in Crimea and other regions, or supplied by India and China. Givaudan, L’Oréal (Lancome, Yves Saint Laurent), Kering (Balenciaga, Gucci), LVMH (Dior, Guerlain, Givenchy), Chanel, Estée Lauder, Clarins – they have all cut off their noses to spite the Russian face.

by Editor - Wednesday, May 18th, 2022
No Comments »

By Nikolai Storozhenko, introduced and translated by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

This week President Joseph Biden stopped at an Illinois farm to say he’s going to help the  Ukraine ship 20 million tonnes of wheat and corn out of storage into export, thereby relieving  grain shortages in the international markets and lowering bread prices around the world.  Biden was trying to play a hand in which his cards have already been clipped. By Biden.  

The first Washington-Kiev war plan for eastern Ukraine has already lost about 40% of the Ukrainian wheat fields, 50% of the barley, and all of the grain export ports. Their second war plan to hold the western region defence lines with mobile armour, tanks, and artillery  now risks the loss of the corn and rapeseed crop as well as the export route for trucks to Romania and Moldova. What will be saved in western Ukraine will be unable to grow enough to feed its own people. They will be forced to import US wheat, as well as US guns and the money to pay for both.

Biden told his audience that on the Delaware farms he used to represent in the US Senate “there are more chickens than there are Americans.”  Blaming the Russians is the other card Biden has left.  

by Editor - Friday, May 13th, 2022
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The problem with living in exile is the meaning of the word. If you’re in exile, you mean you are forever looking backwards, in geography as well as in time. You’re not only out of place; you’re out of time — yesterday’s man.

Ovid, the Roman poet who was sent into exile from Rome by Caesar Augustus, for offences neither Augustus nor Ovid revealed, never stopped looking back to Rome. His exile, as Ovid described it, was “a barbarous coast, inured to rapine/stalked ever by bloodshed, murder, war.” In such a place or state, he said, “writing a poem you can read to no one is like dancing in the dark.”

The word itself, exsilium in Roman law, was the sentence of loss of citizenship as an alternative to loss of life, capital punishment. It meant being compelled to live outside Rome at a location decided by the emperor. The penalty took several degrees of isolation and severity. In Ovid’s case, he was ordered by Augustus to be shipped to the northeastern limit of the Roman empire,  the Black Sea town called Tomis; it is now Constanta, Romania. Ovid’s last books, Tristia (“Sorrows”) and Epistulae ex Ponto (“Black Sea Letters”), were written from this exile, which began when he was 50 years old, in 8 AD, and ended when he died in Tomis nine years year later, in 17 AD.  

In my case I’ve been driven into exile more than once. The current one is lasting the longest. This is the one from Moscow, which began with my expulsion by the Foreign Ministry on September 28, 2010.  The official sentence is Article 27(1) of the law No. 114-FZ — “necessary for the purposes of defence capability or security of the state, or public order, or protection of health of the population.” The reason, a foreign ministry official told an immigration service official when they didn’t know they were being overheard, was: “Helmer writes bad things about Russia.”

by Editor - Wednesday, May 11th, 2022
No Comments »