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 — 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
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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 — When US President Bill Clinton sat down with Boris Yeltsin on September 1 for the first day of their summit meeting, Russia was without a prime minister, a government or a strategy able to deal with the country's worst
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MOSCOW — President Boris Yeltsin on August 23 sacked Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko and the entire government in the midst of a shattering financial crisis. From the second week of August, the country's newly restored
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MOSCOW — The last hopes held by Russian coal miners in the regime of President Boris Yeltsin, historians may yet decide, expired on August 11 in a potato field south of the Ural Mountains city of Chelyabinsk. That was where some
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MOSCOW — After pledging US$22.6 billion to save Russia from economic meltdown, international lenders are being called upon to extend a further US$18 billion. Not, this time, to avoid metaphorical meltdowns, but to help set the
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MOSCOW — In a grim reflection on the state of human rights in Russia, naval journalist and environmental campaigner Grigory Pasko remains in prison on charges of high treason brought against him by the country's security police.