By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Somerset Maugham, the leading story-teller in the Anglo-American market a century ago, said there are three rules for writing a best-seller, but he added: “no one knows what they are.” As unlikely as it is for the profitability of a major line of business to be as unpredictable and irrational as Maugham claimed publishing was, writers and readers go on believing it. It’s the big fiction — talent versus the law of the market.

Mikhail Sholokhov was both talented and also the best-selling writer of the Soviet period.  The centenary of his birth on May 25, 2005, was celebrated by President Vladimir Putin with a visit to Sholokhov’s home and family in the Rostov region.  “Isn’t there anything to remember from the Soviet period except Stalin’s prison camps and repressions?” Putin had asked in a presentation to the State Duma of new legislation on the Russian state symbols.  “What about Dunayevsky, Sholokhov, Shostakovich, Korolyov and our space achievements?” Sholokhov is the only writer on that list.

He was — he still is a symbol of the state. For that reason, although he died in 1984, his four-volume work, Quiet Don (Тихий Дон; also And Quiet Flows the Don), published between 1928 and 1940, continues to draw fierce argument in the Russian press. The first of the allegations against him is that he plagiarized the Quiet Don. That began almost immediately after the first volume was first published in 1928; the debate continues this year on Russian television and the internet.  The second allegation is that Sholokhov and his book would not have succeeded if not for the protection and patronage of Josef Stalin; the charge against Sholokhov’s work is that it’s the discreditable product of Stalinism.

A newly published book by an American academic, Brian Boeck, gives the lie to both these  charges against Sholokhov. But Boeck does much more. He reveals the history of money-grubbing, death-dealing faction-fighting among Russian writers which hasn’t stopped. And that’s the law of the market, which the writers (and other Russian artists and intellectuals) cannot  escape, not under Stalin before, nor under Putin now. The law of the market is that competition for money generates fraud, faking, and when everything else fails in time of war, violence. (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, June 9th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The semi-annual sale of Russian paintings this week by London’s leading auction houses fell short of proving that demand has overcome five years of wartime pressure and is recovering with the price of crude oil.  The Russian art market remains  unsettled, however, by the disappearance of big Russian bidders who are now on the run  from fraud and bankruptcy charges at home and asset freezes around the world.  
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by Editor - Wednesday, June 5th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, has announced in a new documentary film on the shooting-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 that the claim the Russians were responsible was invented from the start. He emphasized that Malaysian officials have been stopped from reviewing the evidence.

Forty-three Malaysian nationals were among the 298 passengers and crew who were killed on board the aircraft on July 17, 2014.  One of them was Puan Sri Siti Amirah, 83, step-grandmother of Najib Razak, who was the Malaysian prime minister  when the aircraft was struck by a ground-fired missile. 

Speaking at his office on May 26, Mahathir said: “They never allowed us to be involved from the very beginning.  This is unfair and unusual. So we can see they are not really looking at the causes of the crash and who was responsible. But already they have decided it must be Russia. So we cannot accept that kind of attitude. We are interested in the rule of law, in justice for everyone irrespective of who is involved. We have to know who actually fired the missile, and only then can we accept the report as the complete truth.” (more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, June 4th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Just three and a half years ago, on January 20, 2016, the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan had good reason to congratulate himself. He had successfully arranged a scheme of payoffs for two men who were intimate advisors to the presidents of the United States and Russia — at the very same time. They were Lieutenant-General Michael Flynn, the National Security Advisor to Donald Trump; and Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for Vladimir Putin. (more…)

by Editor - Monday, June 3rd, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow

For the first time since the execution of Richard Sorge in Sugamo prison, Tokyo, on November 7, 1944, the highest representative of the Red Army and of the Russian Defence Ministry has made an official visit of tribute at his grave. 

Sergei Shoigu (lead picture, right), General of the Army and Minister of Defence, visited Sorge’s grave (left) on Wednesday, May 29.  Also taking the salute were senior Russian military officers and Russia’s Ambassador to Japan, Mikhail Galuzin. Shoigu was on an official visit to Tokyo this week for meetings with the Japanese Defence Minister, Takeshi Iwaya, and for a session with the foreign ministers, Sergei Lavrov and Taro Kono.

Not before in Japan has Sorge, one of the greatest agents of the Soviet military intelligence services, been honoured in this fashion by his country.  (more…)

by Editor - Thursday, May 30th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The US Army’s general staff has paid the RAND think-tank in California to devise a brand new plan of attack against Russia. The plan was released a month ago, on April 24.  The new idea is Operation SWARM – that means throwing everything the US can think of at Russia.

SWARM (lead image) isn’t exactly new. He started in 1977 when Spider-Man discovered SWARM was a German scientist who had survived Hitler’s defeat and escaped to South America. He wasn’t doing too well until he was irradiated by a super-collider at RAND. SWARM  moved to the East Coast of the US,  and then to Syria.  He hasn’t been doing too well against Spider-Man anyplace.

One of the reasons for the new plan is that the Pentagon generals don’t take seriously RAND’s public declaration that it’s “a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous.” The US Army, like RAND, has a narrower view of whose prosperity they aim to help, starting with themselves.

Another of the reasons is that retired State Department official James Dobbins, the lead author of the new attack-Russia plan, needs money to replace his past employment at the State Department and White House where he worked on US wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, and Afghanistan.   Equally in need of cash are his co-authors, several of whom are retirees from the intelligence and armed services. 

And finally the third reason,  as RAND concedes in several charts, is that none of the things the US Government has been throwing at Russia for the past five years has been working as intended, while the risks of BBB have been growing; that’s backfires, boomerangs and bloodshed. (more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, May 29th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Journalism is war by other means. If you don’t understand this you are either an enlisted soldier or a  casualty with a serious head-wound.  On the ground covered by journalism it’s impossible to hide;  innocent civilians are inevitably caught in the cross-fire.

Most Russians have known this since the start of the nineteenth century.

After Anton Chekhov’s reports from Sakhalin were published between 1891 and 1893, Russian  journalism didn’t recover to his standard for fifty years. It began again at the German invasion on June 22, 1941. But it lasted for just four years – until the Red Army victory in Berlin and the capitulation of the Germans in May 1945.

Vasily Grossman (lead image) was one of the very best of the Russian reporters on the front in that brief period. He far excelled his English-writing peers on other fronts, particularly American fakers like Ernest Hemingway. 

A new biography of Grossman, published in the US, reveals in Grossman’s own words why he is still a model of the genre in Russian. It also explains how and why he was silenced on orders of Josef Stalin, and his major book, combining his battlefield notes and interviews, banned from 1961 until 1988.  

“Evil is overthrown”, Grossman reportedly said to another Russian correspondent on the roof of the Reichstag on May 2, 1945. Just for the time being, he acknowledged later on.

There can be no irony, just dismay that Grossman’s biography demonstrates that the biographer, Alexandra Popoff, a Russian turned Canadian, and her publisher, the Yale University Press, have no comprehension of what Grossman meant, nor of his lesson for journalism the world over – that evil isn’t overthrown.  That today, as you read this, it’s alive and well in Canada and at Yale University, not to mention Berlin (again), Paris, London, Washington, and not to forget, Moscow (again). Grossman the Russian soldier is on the opposite side from Popoff the American soldier. (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, May 26th, 2019
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By Andrei Maximov, Moscow*

The oil company of the ex-owner of Yugra Bank, now under arrest, managed to embezzle not less than 20 billion rubles from the state budget.

Gasoline prices in Russia have become the subject of almost daily meetings of the government, as well as jokes and internet memes. Social networks are full of impressive price comparison charts: for example, in 2008, when oil cost $130 per barrel, drivers at petrol stations paid 23.5 rubles for a litre of 95-octane, and in 2018, with an average oil price of $70, they paid almost 45 rubles. The state puts the blame for these rising prices on the oilmen, who strive to sell most of their raw materials abroad. They, in turn, don’t get tired of reminding everyone how much of a share in the rising price is taken by taxes and excise duties.  Beyond this endless discussion (at least in the public part of it) there is only corruption and theft to explain the price. These two factors, meanwhile, play a significant role in the price of the final product and in the amount of taxes collected, as the example of the oil company Dulisma shows.

Joint Stock Company Dulisma has become one of the frequently identified enterprises in the background of media coverage of the arrest of Alexei Khotin (lead image, right), the former owner of Yugra Bank, which was stripped of its license by the Central Bank in July 2017.  (more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, May 22nd, 2019
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By Paul Robinson, Ottawa*

Helmer is an equal opportunity critic. And in the current political climate that is unacceptable. One is either with us or against us. Any signs of whataboutism, or any criticisms of the prevailing Western narrative which indicate that you’re not 100% on our side, are proof positive that is that you must be a fully paid up Kremlin agent. It is, of course, absurd, but alas it seems that that’s the way it is.
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by Editor - Monday, May 20th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow

By the European standard of destructiveness in war — civil war and invasion — only one country exceeds Russia in the frequency of violence over the past two centuries and in casualties per head of population: this  is Greece. In Europe of today, no country has been as damaged by the serial attacks of the Turks, Germans, British, Americans, and also by the Greeks themselves, as Greece. No European suffers today from more impoverished future prospects than the Greek.

This is the dismal lesson of a new history, just published by a British academic and philhellene, as foreign lovers of Greece have been called since Lord Byron and Victor Hugo.   The history is also a valuable record of the dozens of times   Greeks appealed for Russian aid, and when Russians, having promised to help, turned out to be double-crossers. Indeed, starting from Catherine II in 1770 until Vladimir Putin today, this mistake Greeks (including Cypriots) and Russians make towards each other has been repeated. Re-reading the history may help stop the vicious cycle. So may the extended range of Russian air and sea missiles. (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, May 19th, 2019
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