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.
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MOSCOW — According to Kemerovo province governor Aman Tuleyev in a broadcast on July 14, everyone in the city of Yurga condemned the local workers who were blocking the tracks of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Furthermore, Tuleyev
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MOSCOW — On Russia's labour scene, July traditionally has been a quiet month. Workers by mid-summer have been ready to set off on holiday, or to spend the warm, twilit evenings relaxing on their garden allotments. True, a
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MOSCOW — When Russia's new rich are called upon to invest, produce, pay their taxes and help save the country from economic oblivion, it is only to be expected that they will want a bribe. The anti-crisis economic program tabled
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MOSCOW — Early on June 11, a train drew into Yaroslavsky Station here, bringing 150 miners from the Pechora coal basin in the Arctic north. Linking arms, the miners marched through central Moscow to the building that houses the
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MOSCOW — No-one who has lived without a car in both Moscow and major western cities can be wholly cynical about the achievements of Soviet society. Whether it's twice-daily Sunday bus services to outlying Sydney suburbs, or the