Month: August 2007

August 8, 2007

Deripaska Bought 5% Stake in GM Last Year

Today the Financial Times and other media sources are reporting that Oleg Deripaska acquired close to a 5% stake in General Motors worth more than $900 million last year. Last October, when rumors of this stake first circulated, Deripaska’s ...
August 8, 2007

The Hair Apparent

Today from Reuters: “Another theory circulating in the media is that the next president will have plenty of hair on his head. This is based on an analysis of Russian history since revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin: Kremlin leaders who are ...
August 7, 2007

Former Russian Spy on Putin’s “Selective” Stalinism

Former Russian Spy Oleg Kalugin says he had a change of heart about the KGB when he was transferred to the domestic service. Below are a few excerpts from an interview by the magazine Foreign Policy with the Washington DC-based former KGB senior o...
August 7, 2007

RA in the Globe and Mail: Polar Bear Warning

The attached short letter from Robert Amsterdam was published in the Globe and Mail on August 4. Polar Bear Warning ROBERT AMSTERDAM Amsterdam & Peroff LLP August 4, 2007 Toronto — In response to your editorial (Pushing Ahead On The Arc...
August 7, 2007

Pichugin Handed Down Life Sentence

This week the Russian procuracy, with its infinite fictional legal authority, successfully won an appeal to increase the sentence given to former Yukos security chief Alexei Pichugin on murder charges from 24 years to life in a hard labor gulag. P...
August 6, 2007

Shevtsova on Russia’s New National Idea

Below is a very compelling article from Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Moscow Centre published in the Moscow Times. Anti-Westernism is the New National Idea By Lilia Shevtsova The Russian political elite has long dreamed of finding a national ide...
August 6, 2007

Russia to Open Arms Factories in Venezuela

Another less than encouraging bit of news from Russia’s burgeoning “strategic cooperation” with Venezuela: Russia to Start Work on Venezuela Kalashnikov Plants in October Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) — Russia will start building two ...