In the final years of perestroika, when there was little in Soviet shops except bare shelves and bored salespeople, Russians could still comfort themselves: at least you could always get bread. In four or five varieties, at prices so low they are almost painful to remember: about 25 kopecks (at the time, a few US cents) for a half-kilo loaf.
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MOSCOW — In January, my friend Valya was sacked from her job. A former English teacher, energetic and self-assured, she had quit an office job with a Russian commercial firm in order to take up an offer of better-paid
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MOSCOW — In the coal-mining centre of Partizansk in the Maritime District of Russia's Far East, most miners go to work with nothing more than bread and sugar in their lunch boxes. From time to time, miners collapse on
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MOSCOW — On June 29, a flash flood overwhelmed a large sewage treatment plant near Kharkov, Ukraine's second-largest city. Sewage backed up, choking equipment and putting the plant out of action. Raw waste began pouring
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MOSCOW — The typical Russian murder: the door of a Jeep Grand Cherokee swings open, cartridge-cases from an assault rifle spray onto the pavement, and a strongly built, crew-cut young man in a strawberry-coloured jacket
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MOSCOW — Throughout much of the second week of July, the streets of the Chechen capital, Grozny, were under the control of demonstrators chanting anti-Russian slogans and holding up portraits of separatist leaders. Russian
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MOSCOW — The Budyonnovsk hostage crisis soon merged into the most ominous constitutional stand-off in Russia since October 1993. The political battle opened up on June 21 when the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian
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MOSCOW — The parallels with Russia in 1993 were uncanny. As the economy crashed, the president demanded a speeding-up of free-market reforms as the only solution. And if these reforms were to be implemented, an essential
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MOSCOW — Alexander Lukashenko was elected president of Belarus — a republic of 10 million people on Russia's western border — by a big majority last July. He ran as an independent waging a classic "anti-politician"
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MOSCOW — Yes, there are to be parliamentary elections in Russia in December. After repeated indications that the authorities wanted the polls put off indefinitely, or run in conjunction with the presidential election due for
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MOSCOW — News of a vast gas leak and explosion on April 27 in the Komi Republic, 1500 kilometres north-east of the Russian capital, has again focused attention on the catastrophic state of Russia's oil and gas pipeline
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MOSCOW — First, in 1992, there was shock and disorientation as the beginning of "reform" threw at least a third of the Russian population into poverty. Then, in 1993 and 1994, even while output in the economy continued to