MOSCOW — When Russians these days hear promises of "reform", they often grit their teeth and brace themselves for something thoroughly unpleasant. One of the latest such shocks befell residents of St Petersburg in the last
-
-
MOSCOW — In formal terms, the Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), held here on April 19 and 20, was a triumph for party leader Gennady Zyuganov. The KPRF chief
-
MOSCOW — You're a worker in an industrial city of provincial Russia, and you haven't been paid in months. You and your family would starve if it weren't for the vegetables you raise in a garden plot on the outskirts of town.
-
MOSCOW — Of the new breed of labour protests, one of the first to make the news took place on February 27 in the town of Salair, in Kemerovo province in Siberia. After going unpaid for some nine months, several hundred
-
MOSCOW — Want to make a pile in post-Soviet Russia? Now that privatisation is mostly complete, the readiest ways of having big roubles drop into your lap belong to the past. But riches can still be yours. The Russian
-
MOSCOW — During 1996, the head of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, General Viktor Samsonov, told journalists recently, about 500 of the country's military officers committed suicide. As recently as 1991, the
-
MOSCOW — Millions of workers across Russia struck and demonstrated on March 27 in one of the greatest outpourings of labour protest in the country's history. The key demand was for the prompt payment of spiralling wage debts.
-
MOSCOW — Driven by increasing rank and file ferment, Russia's trade union bodies have united around a call for a day of work stoppages and demonstrations to force the government and employers to pay spiralling wage debts. Set
-
Russian budget-cutters court environmental disasterMOSCOW — Sergey Mund, the director of the Elektrogorsk Institute for Oil Processing, was clearly worried. On his institute's premises just east of Moscow were 663 rods of
-
MOSCOW — During 1996, Russia's Ministry of Defence Industry reported in January, output in the country's defence factories fell by a further 27.1% to a mere 12.8% of its 1991 level. That's not so bad, you might say — every
-
MOSCOW — In late January in Russia, the economic figures from the previous year are released. Supporters of the government have done their best to put a favourable gloss on the latest numbers, but the truth cannot be concealed
-
MOSCOW — When the bright young reformers around Russian President Boris Yeltsin quit their Communist Party membership years ago and turned to building capitalism, they were acting from deep-seated ideological conviction. We have