Editor’s note:  On 10 December of last year, less than a week after the death of the incumbent Patriarch of All the Russias, Alexiy II, our Russia Correspondent Grigory Pasko made a bold prediction, inconspicuously tucked away in a corner of an article about a phenomenon he referred to as The «Russian Federation» Corporation.

For those of you who missed it, Grigory Pasko prophesied that the next Patriarch of All the Russias, freely elected by a conclave of all the bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, would be a certain Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, a figure “closely associated” with Igor Sechin – himself a figure “closely associated” with just about everything that generates big money in Putin’s Russia.

As is so often the case in Russia today, the future turns out to be rather easy to predict, but still we’d like to boast that you heard the news of Kirill’s election first right here on our blog more than a month and a half before it actually happened. – Editor