The killing of Lake BaikalMOSCOW — There are not many places in the world where you can leave an industrial plant in operation and doom hundreds of species of plants and animals to extinction. One such place is Siberia's Lake
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As schools decay, Russian teachers protestMOSCOW — When Russian authorities learned on December 15 that striking teachers had blocked an important rail line, it may finally have dawned on them that the situation in the
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MOSCOW — On November 27, a Supreme Court judge here refused to order the release pending trial of Grigory Pasko, a Vladivostok naval journalist charged with treason after reporting on the dumping of nuclear waste by the Russian
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MOSCOW — The scene might have appeared mundane, scarcely news at all: lying inert in a St Petersburg stairwell on November 20, killed by a shot to the base of her skull, was a 52-year-old woman. The fact that the victim was
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MOSCOW — The setting could have been Germany in the 1930s. Over a period of about a month, a well-known parliamentary deputy claimed that "Yids" were responsible for the country's economic problems; vowed before media reporters
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MOSCOW — Russians, like other northern Europeans, tend to be tall if properly fed. "If" is of course the important word here: throughout most of Russia's history, the nutrition of the bulk of the population has been abominable.
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MOSCOW — The defence of human rights and the environment in Russia scored an important victory on October 29, when a St Petersburg judge rejected treason charges brought by security police against nuclear safety campaigner
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ANZHERO-SUDZHENSK, Russia — The Soviet system had a way of playing cruel jokes on this coal-mining centre in the Kuzbass industrial region of Siberia. One such malign whim was to locate the city administration building hard by
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KEMEROVO, Russia — Gennady Filatyev, director of the Volkov coalmine near this city in the Kuzbass industrial region of Siberia, is a bull of a man. When he leans across a lectern, gesticulating as he makes a point, he could be
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Russian government sacrifices wages to save oligarchsMOSCOW — After weeks of being a "certainty", there will be no crash of Russia's speculative, mafia-infested banking system — not yet, anyway. Instead, the crash is likely
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MOSCOW — "If we don't have any money, the price of the dollar can go up 10 times and it won't make any difference to us!", declares Lyudmila Tyulenko, sitting by a makeshift hut outside Moscow's main federal government office
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MOSCOW — A few days ago, my friend Rod came around unexpectedly to visit. He brought a bottle of vodka, but he wasn't feeling festive. Quite the reverse. An Englishman who has spent much of the 1990s in Moscow, Rod had just lost