Russians seem to have a thing about months. Why, for example, is the 1917 revolution known as the ‘October’ revolution? Why do we call the leaders of the attempted coup of 1825 the ‘Decembrists’? If it had happened a few weeks later, would they have been known throughout history as the ‘Januarists’?

I can only speculate that the importance given to months is an example of Russian superstition and fatalism – the implication is that the Bolshevik revolution was always going to happen in October, that the aristocrats’ failed coup was always going to fail in December, that these events were written down in the Book of Life, as surely as Julius Caesar’s assassination was written to occur in March.

And of all the months, Russians are most superstitious and most fatalist about August.

August, as everyone knows, is the month of disasters in Russia. It was in August that the KGB attempted to seize power from Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, prompting the rapid dissolution of the USSR. It was in August 1998 that the stock market lost 55% of its value. It was in August 2000 that the Kursk submarine sank, with 118 souls on-board. And it was in August last year, most terribly of all, that terrorists seized a primary school in Beslan.

This Augustophobia, I assure you, is not limited just to peasants and old wives. Every foreign correspondent in Moscow knows – make sure you’re not on holiday in August, because something bad and, I’m afraid, newsworthy, is bound to happen.

So when a mini-submarine became trapped in a fishing net off the coast of Kamchatka, with seven people on board, the Russian press naturally feared the worst. An editorial in Kommersant said: “August is a black month for our submarine fleet…Will they be rescued? Or will it turn out the way it always does?” Moskovskiy Komsomolets was even more pessimistic. “A tragedy”, it wrote, “is inevitable”.

And then, to everyone’s surprise – including my own – the submarine was cut free of the curse of August, by a Scorpio underwater robot. All the crew survived, and I have a picture by my desk of them sitting, arm in arm, looking very relieved.

What makes the rescue operation particularly unusual is that the Russian Navy should have so quickly asked for international help in rescuing the craft. The lesson of the Kursk disaster, where the Navy refused to accept foreign assistance, seems to have been learnt, and for once, the Russian government put openness and trust in foreigners above the need for secrecy.

This time, the Navy rapidly asked for help, the British Navy was quick to respond, and the sea-men were saved. This, perhaps, was the most encouraging example of Anglo-Russian cooperation since the TNK-BP merger, or the Paul McCartney gig in St Petersburg.

Both the Russian government and Russian media took a healthy, rather un-Russian attitude to this assistance from abroad. Even the Defence Ministry newspaper Red Star wrote: “Partnership and alliance with the world's leading powers is far more productive than confrontation… everybody on the planet is becoming ever more interrelated and interdependent. Had Russia been at loggerheads at this moment with Britain or the USA, we could have said goodbye to the submarine and goodbye to the crew…”

The fact is, Russia and the UK have to some extent been at loggerheads this summer, over the British government’s inability to extradite Akhmed Zakayev. For many Russians, this failure is evidence of the British government’s secret desire to support Chechen radicals and hasten the dissolution of the Russian state, because ‘the West fears a strong Russia’.

Hopefully the trusty Scorpio has helped cut free Anglo-Russian relations from the net of misconceptions and prejudices. The British government would probably love to extradite Zakayev if it could. Indeed, I met the lawyer who defended Zakayev at a party in London last month – a famous human rights barrister called Edward Fitzgerald. He told me the magistrate who was trying the Zakayev case had received calls from both Buckingham Palace and the Home Office, stressing how important the case was to Anglo-Russian relations. “So much for independence of the judiciary!” as Fitzgerald put it.

Unfortunately for the government, the magistrate ignored the pressure from above, and decided both that there was insufficient evidence that Zakayev was a terrorist, and that he would not receive a fair trial in Russia. But the point is – the government and even the Queen did all they could, maybe even more than they normally could, to extradite Zakayev, but they were unable to do so.

Anyway, I digress. The submarine was freed, August was defied. It’s not the only piece of positive news this August. Last week, the RTS stock market reached a new all-time high. It has smashed through the 800 barrier, and keeps on climbing.

One fund manager, Chuck Tennas at Alfa Capital, tells me that actually the curse of August, from a market perspective, is a fiction. He says: “Of course, it’s hard to forget 1998. But in fact, in the nine years of the RTS’ history, the RTS has had a good August six times out of nine.”

This, perhaps, is what happens when a country that has traditionally been rather isolated and paranoid slowly becomes more integrated into the world’s political and economic structures. Parochial voodoo thinking like ‘the West hates Russia’ or ‘August hates Russia’ slowly become replaced by the more common-sense realization that no country or abstract entity is ‘against’ Russia (OK, maybe just the Baltics) and things are actually going quite well.

Julian Evans is a British freelance journalist based in Moscow. The article is written specially for "Eurasian Home".

August 10, 2005