By Michael Averko

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itial approval of a bill barring nationwide referendums in years preceding presidential and parliamentary elections, prompting the Communist Party chief to protest to the Council of Europe.

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t; express bound for Moscow slides forward out of the station. Right on cue, piped music strikes up boisterously with a morale-boosting tsarist army march.

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day that Russia's hopes for increased economic cooperation with Europe should be based on a common set of values, expressing concern over the continuing campaign in Chechnya...

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trade forum met in the Pacific coast port of Vladivostok on Wednesday for a week of talks and an investment fair that Russian companies hope will bring some dlrs 200 million in pledges...

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pendent trade unions and promote workers' rights in Russia says she is convinced she will be allowed back into the country, after being refused entry on Dec. 30.

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ing forward in their work in Iraq and the International Atomic Energy Agency intends to ask for more time to complete their task, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said Thursday.

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to revise its estimates of economic growth for this year, head of the macroeconomic forecasts department of the Russian Economy Ministry Andrey Klepach...

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the "grim" living conditions provided for refugees who have returned to Chechnya's ruined capital and called for a political settlement of the 3-year-old war in the region, saying that...

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hat Russia's fight against drug addiction had failed to yield results and called for more action to stem the rising problem.

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ia to arrest and extradite a prominent Chechen warlord, one of the main sore points in the worsening relations between the two former Soviet republics.

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By John Helmer in Moscow

For a brief moment, the death of Boris Yeltsin in April allowed his supporters and critics to reappear in full cry; particularly his supporters, whose attacks on the Putin administration have failed to attract an audience outside Embassy Row, and who are naturally nostalgic for the days when their bons mots drew better remuneration.

Since almost no Russian or western correspondent remains in Moscow today, who reported on the Gorbachev, the Yeltsin, and the Putin administrations, the Yeltsin obituary columns were largely an exercise in wishful retro-thinking -- and exhibitionism.

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By John Helmer in Moscow
It’s a pity Vladimir Lenin was tone deaf, and dismissed music (along with chess) as an entertainment for the ruling class. Had he an ear and taste for classical music (like Karl Marx, who was keen on Beethoven, and Leon Trotsky, who loved Verdi), he might have devised a revolutionary doctrine for the performing arts. This could have protected Russia from the likes of Mstislav Rostropovich the cellist, Nikita Mikhalkov the filmmaker, Valery Gergiev the conductor, and X the theatre director.
I regret I am obliged to avoid using X’s, or his Moscow theatre’s real name, because he and his colleagues are so thin-skinned, so despotic, and so vengeful, they brook no criticism, and would react by attacking the livelihood of a member of my family.

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By John Helmer in Moscow

There have been two deconstructionists and reconstructivists of the music of J.S. Bach in our time. Both are dead now -- Glenn Gould, aged 50, died in 1982; and Mstislav Rostropovich, aged 80, died this week. The music of one of them will live forever.

It was forty-four years ago, I remember, on a dry, wintry Saturday afternoon in January of 1963, when Rostropovich played Bach’s six unaccompanied cello suites in Tokyo. The concert was in the then brand-new, ultra-modern concert hall in Ueno Park, which was sold out for the solo recital. To get in for a back seat, I spent all of my scarce student’s money, and had to do without dinner that evening to hear the music. After watching the ungainly bulk of the man, alone on the vast stage, wrestle his instrument into life, and release the music like a slow detonation from one end of the music-hall to the other, I felt a charge; as you can see, I remember it to this day. For years afterwards, there was no other performer for me of the Bach cello suites – not Casals, nor Fournier, nor Piatigorsky, nor Rose, nor the next generation of Du Pre and Ma. To a young man’s ear, Rostropovich’s interpretation replaced the romantic, rhapsodic lilt, exposing the revolutionary structures of sound that had been missed in Bach’s own time. For all I knew then, Rostropovich’s performance was the first not to miss it.

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By Ajay Goyal
Russians know how to throw a party – and how to ruin one.

The tenth year anniversary of the Russian Economic Forum of London might also be its last. There won’t be many Russians worth exchanging cards with this year.

I am surprised it lasted this long. For five years running, I asked my managers at The Russia Journal not to have anything to do with this forum. Here’s why.

The forum itself is a modest business success story for a Russian businessman from Siberia who came to England a decade ago. He partnered with some former employees of Russo-British Chamber of Commerce, and together they launched Eventica – the company that organizes this convention. Over the years the event drew thousands of Russians, their wives and mistresses to London. Russians mostly came to party, meet each other and shop. European and British companies, mostly to sell.

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By John Helmer in Moscow

If life were a circus, then the only reason a contemplative man would walk behind an elephant in a ring, wielding bucket and shovel, would be for the money, not for the laughs.

John Lloyd, a onetime Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times, has made many of his colleagues and readers laugh at him. But it was his eulogy upon the death of ex-President Boris Yeltsin, just published by the Financial Times, that has been convincing. Lloyd hasn’t been clowning all this time for laughs. He’s been putting shit in a bucket for the money.

And good money it was, certainly when his then wife headed the Moscow office of a well-known English law firm, and Lloyd filled his Moscow despatches with tales of the good fortune falling from the parapets of the Kremlin for her clientele. There was the odd and embarrassing pratfall; the time, for example, when Lloyd reported, and the FT printed, that Yegor Gaidar had been voted in as prime minister, when that favourite of Lloyd, his wife’s law firm, and the FT had in fact been trounced by Victor Chernomyrdin. Thus did Gaidar’s high political career end – in retrospect, we can now say, for good – while Lloyd was telling the FT audience the reverse.

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By John Helmer in Moscow

To understand how and what to buy in a Russian metals company, you need to understand a Soviet joke.

On a visit to Paris, the then Soviet ruler Nikita Khrushchev arranged to visit a brothel. On arriving, he asked the madam, “How much for a room?” “Depends on the room,” she replied. “There are 500-franc rooms, 100-franc rooms, 50-france room, and 1-franc rooms.” “Give me a 1-franc room,” Khrushchev said.

He was then shown to a room, where he sat for ten minutes. Noone came. For twenty minutes, still noone. At the half-hour mark, nothing had happened, and Khrushchev was furious. He picked up the telephone, and roared. The madam appeared swiftly. “This is an outrage,” shouted the First Secretary of the Communist Party. “I’ve been waiting here for half an hour, and noone has shown up!”

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Dances with Bears

By John Helmer in Moscow

With a little more bulge at the waistline, and a little more bush in his beard, Victor Vekselberg would be a dead ringer for Tevye the Milkman, hero of Fiddler on the Roof, Broadway’s most famous musical about Russia. The fiddler of that tale was a symbol of survival in the rough days in Russia, before the Communist Revolution.

In the fifteen years since that revolution was reversed, starting in 1992, Vekselberg has survived especially well. You might say that Victor’s theme song has taken all the conditional out of Tevye’s famous song, If I were a Rich Man:

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By John Helmer in Moscow

The ancient Greeks had unusual trouble understanding the weather and their bowels; the problem they had with Aeolus, god of winds, reflected this confusion.

Among the myth writers, Aeolus was at least three different characters, with more than three different fates. To some he was born a man of man and a nymph, ruler of Aeolia (central Greece, now Thessaly), and progenitor of at least 14 undistinguished children. To others he was born of a god; ruled an island north of Crete; and lived happily with 12 children -- until two of them committed incest. In a third version, he was a minor god, living on a floating island where he was visited by Odysseus and his crew in the tale of the Odyssey. To them he gave a west wind to help them sail home; but also a bag with each of the four winds, which they unwisely opened, just before reaching home, only to be blown back to Aeolia.

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By John Helmer in Moscow

Russia's worst-ever coalmine disaster this week, in which at least 106 have been killed, casts doubt on claims by Evraz, the Russian steelmaker seeking to acquire Highveld Steel & Vanadium in South Africa, that its industrial practices, work safety record, and environmental compliance meet the required standards.

South African government regulators are currently reviewing Evraz's bid to buy control of Highveld for a total of $678 million.

US regulators have already cleared Evraz to take over Oregon Steel Mills, which operates plants in Oregon and Colorado. During that review, which followed Evraz's $2.3 billion acquisition offer last November, Evraz told the Oregon media: "We would like to be environmentally friendly wherever we operate."

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By John Helmer in Moscow

The visit to Athens this week by President Vladimir Putin -- his second in six months, a Russian presidential record -- is so unusual, its meaning may not be fully understood by Greeks. Moreover, few Russians accompanying Putin are able to put into clear perspective the relationship which the President himself is trying to create.

For one thing, by choosing to meet his Greek and Bulgarian counterparts for a second signing ceremony that he could have delegated to a lower level, Putin is putting an end to false hopes that have bedeviled the Burgas-Alexandropoulos pipeline project for the decade that preceded Putin's direct intervention last year.

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By John Helmer in Moscow

Oleg Deripaska is under unexpected personal pressure, at home and abroad, just when his plan to take control of one of the largest bauxite and aluminium producers in the world is close to final government approval. And that is exactly why the trouble for Deripaska is growing now.

Russian government authorization this month of the creation of a monopoly aluminium concern, integrating domestic and foreign bauxite, alumina, and aluminium production assets, has followed a no-objection ruling from the European Commission (EC) in Brussels. The unconditional ruling was issued by the EC on February 1.

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