In 1970 to visit the USSR you had to book everything in advance and collect a bunch of coupons from the travel agent in London. These coupons were used instead of money. So we turned up in our Ford Cortina at Vyborg on schedule on 4 September. There was a short stretch of road through the woods between the actual border and the border post and in ( Read more... )

Poor Boris seems to have been so thoroughly forgotten that when he suddenly died last night, the agencies had to throw something together in haste. Early reports were portraying him as the 'liberator' who brought democracy and freedom to Russia. This seems to be code for 'he pushed Gorbachev aside to make room for the shock therapy'. Yeltsin's rule ( Read more... )

I have been listening with interest to the brouhaha surrounding the 9 year gaol term of Mikhail Khordukovsky. There are several issues involved, but the tendency in press reporting has been to focus on the issue MK's supposedly unfair trial and what that means for democracy in Russia ( Read more... )