07 ноября 2008

Что было бы, если бы сегодня в России появился человек с мировоззрением Обамы – обычный парень, успешный, немного более честный, чем остальные, рассуждающий о мире, реформах здравоохранения и правосудия? Я не думаю, что он приблизился бы к президентским выборам на расстояние пушечного выстрела.

08 декабря 2008

The cri… no the word will not be uttered. Now that President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin have finally allowed themselves to belatedly use the word, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to spit it out of these lips. It’s c-this and c-that. If there was C-Span in Russia then it would be c-ing all day and all night long.

05 ноября 2008

When were you last excited about an election in Russia? Any election? I've seen four presidential elections in Russia and the only one that had any excitement was in 1996 when many feared a Communist victory would swing the country back to its Soviet past.

15 октября 2008

Take a drive around Moscow’s Garden Ring. Leave from the Railway ministry near Krasniye Vorota and go anticlockwise toward Tsvetnoi Bulvar. Time will stand still if you are sitting in a traffic jam but if you have a free road, look upwards at the clocks on buildings and you can go back in time.

30 сентября 2008

You can't trust anyone these days. You go on holiday for a couple of weeks and when you come back the world is teetering on the edge of a financial abyss. Banks are imploding, insurance companies are collapsing. Still, I'm glad that I got my five credit cards when I could.

05 сентября 2008

I once lived off Tverskaya in a house that had a spacious courtyard which would see a steady trickle of men celebrating City Day who were drawn like a teenager to a can of gin and tonic to relieve themselves of a bladder full of Baltika's finest. Now, that is not really the kind of thing that sends me into a fury.

22 августа 2008

I read the story in the New York Times this week, "West Baffled by 2 Heads for Russian Government," and it gave me quite a turn. This article talks of how "there is a sense of bewilderment in Washington about how to deal with what is now a two-headed government in Moscow."

08 августа 2008

There was a game we played when I was a child where you would run to the top of the nearest hill, sand dune or rampaging Tyrannosaurus Rex (kids had more imagination in those days) and shout “I'm the King of the Castle and you're the dirty rascal.” These last words were said whilst pointing at the poor unfortunates who had failed to get to the top in time.

25 июля 2008

The good people of Vladivostok recently had the chance to see my mug on their televisions. Or the chance not to watch it. Anyone further west however was denied that chance after NTV pulled reporter Andrei Loshak's documentary from the schedule even though it had already been shown in the Far East.