The above is the title of an article in Vzglyad.ru that appeared yesterday. If true, those in Moscow who had pinned their hopes on drawing Turkey out of NATO, thereby breaking its southern flank, are seeing their hopes dashed, as are those Americans who believed that by giving Turkey a free hand in northern Syria … Continue reading Erdogan is Playing with Moscow and Washington

A fascinating article has just appeared today in Komsomolskaya pravda by Dmitrii Smirnov of the Kremlin press corps on the importance of sport for the current generation of political leaders in Russia; in particular, those sports with practical application for self-defence. Vladimir Putin is the obvious example of a skinny young man on the streets … Continue reading Putin as a Fighter among Fighters

The fundamental problem of the Russian economy is that, having abandoned central planning, Russia has yet to stand on its own feet as a free market system. The corrupt liberalisation of the economy's commanding heights in the mid-1990s under President Boris Yeltsin, whose family had fingers in the pie, discredited a very necessary process and … Continue reading Entrepreneurs Won’t Play Ball

It was Nikita Khrushchev who boldly exposed Stalin's crimes at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, opening Pandora's Box and unchaining the Soviet Union from the evils of the recent past. But a reaction set in with his ouster and the emergence of Leonid Brezhnev as Party Secretary in October 1964. The Central Committee began … Continue reading The Reluctance to Condemn Stalin

President Trump's hasty withdrawal from northern Syria clearly applies only with respect to the Turkish invasion. The White House, mainly under Pentagon pressure but also no doubt to ease the troubled minds of agitated Republican senators, decided to hang on to the country's oil fields to the south-east merely to deny them to the Assad … Continue reading Further Signs that the Military Are Unhappy

Only four days ago, we took a look at the de luxe Sochi summit on Africa. The President of the Central African Republic, Touadéra, heads a landlocked former French colony blessed with diamonds but rent by ethnic division, endowed with a benighted climate where it is either too dry or too wet but always too … Continue reading A Base in Darkest Africa?

Searching Russian television sites is, I must confess, not my métier. Contrary to what I previously concluded,  Zvezda television has, in fact, now broadcast two episodes online of its new documentary on the "legends" of Soviet Intelligence . The first, on Konon Molody (alias Gordon Lonsdale), focused on the creation and operations of the Portland … Continue reading Legends of Soviet Intelligence: The Cohens