Year: 2008

August 5, 2008

Today in Russian Business – Aug 5, 2008

From Reuters: “Investors are plowing money into Russia’s open lands to resuscitate the long-neglected farm sector and supply a world in ever greater need of food. This year’s Russian wheat crop promises to be the best in 30 years.” The...
August 5, 2008

RA’s Daily Russia News Blast – Aug 5, 2008

TODAY: Putin talks terror, calls for stronger ties with Cuba; world tributes for Solzhenitsyn; Khodorkovsky parole hearing set; new general appointed as NATO envoy. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has expressed concern that there is currently a high...
August 4, 2008

“One Word of Truth Shall Outweigh the Whole World”

The death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Moscow this weekend, aged 89, has created a media sensation, with most major newspaper running two or three stories on the author and dissident. Solzhenitsyn was a Nobel literature prize winner, whose first s...
August 4, 2008

FT: Russia’s Bear is a Cub

Over the weekend, the Financial Times ran a piece by Stefan Wagstyl on Russia’s economic situation that focuses on the contradiction of “serious weaknesses” at work behind the external image of its booming economy. The article may help to balance ...
August 4, 2008

Energy Blast – Aug 4, 2008

Shell (which has just reported profits of $4 million an hour) is considering a £1bn asset swap with Sibir Energy, its joint partner in the Salym oilfields venture in western Siberia, in order to “remain in the Kremlin’s good books”. London-listed ...
August 4, 2008

Today in Russian Business – Aug 4, 2008

Russia: “Everything is for sale.” The Telegraph argues that the influence of Russian businessmen and billionaires in London is underestimated. Pirelli and Rostekhnologhii have reached an agreement to build a tyre plant at Togliatti in Russia. Russ...
August 4, 2008

RA’s Daily Russia News Blast – Aug 4, 2008

TODAY: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, dies in Moscow; Yabloko party criticizes psychiatric repressions; Nevzlin given life sentence; Russians increasingly opposed to single-party system; violence in South Ossetia kills 6;...
August 3, 2008

The Posthumous Attack on Khrushchev

This one comes from the Associated Press – and it doesn’t seem clear whether this posthumous smear attack against Nikita Khrushchev is motivated by the nationalist’s nostalgic reinvention of Stalin, or the outspoken nature of the...
August 3, 2008

Gentrification Hits the Regions

So many new millionaires in Russia, but where to put them? A new series of luxury housing developments and gated communities out in the regions, often pushed forward with aggressive tactics and intimidation of local population, is raising a whole ...
August 2, 2008

Grigory Pasko: Next Generation Chekists

The chekists’ latest act of valor Grigory Pasko, journalist Recently, the director of the FSB of Russia, General of the Army Alexander Bortnikov, congratulated young officers with the completion of studies at the FSB academy and called upon them t...