Monthly Archives: December 2009
My kingdom for an ounce of foresight
A couple weeks before the first snows trickled from the low-slung Moscow firmament, the city’s mayor Yuri Luzhkov announced that he would have no trickles in his town. The Russian Air Force seeds clouds for the May Day and Victory … Continue reading
Isn't it ironic?
Today, the Russian parliament finally approved the use of house arrest for those accused of not-so-serious crimes, like economic ones. Not that they would have put him there since they were probably holding him in horrible conditions to squeeze out … Continue reading
Death of a kamikaze
Early this morning, economist and reformer Yegor Gaidar died of a blood clot in his home in the Moscow suburbs. He was 53. What Yeltsin was to political liberalization, Gaidar was to the Russian economy. It was Gaidar who, in … Continue reading
Get mad, get even, get the train
This afternoon, some 2o0 refugees from Georgia, Ingushetia and Chechnya got so sick of the horrible conditions in a Polish refugee camp — the rotten food, the non-existent medical care — that they got on a train bound for Dresden, … Continue reading
Let the purges begin
You have to hand it to the Russian government. For all its corruption and mind-melting bureaucratic labyrinths, it knows how to act swiftly and decisively when trouble hits. Usually, this means firing people or kabashing things, quickly and without too … Continue reading
