In “Les Liaisons Dangereuses”, the 18th century French expose of the way vicious people plot to undermine virtue, it is allowed to a manservant to point out to the villain, the Vicomte de Valmont, that “going to bed with a girl only means getting her to do something she wants to do; but from that […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, February 25th, 2004
No Comments »

For a decade Washington has been backing the Turkish and Azerbaihan governments to steer the export of Caspian region crude oil away from Russia, Russia’s newest riposte has been to ally the Russian and Iranian oil industries, and open up the shortest, cheapest, and most lucrative oil route of all, southwards out of the Caspian […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, February 4th, 2004
No Comments »

Picasso was late for dinner at Gertrude Stein’s in Paris in 1907, when Alice B. Toklas said to him, after the painter had been seated beside her, that she liked his portrait of Stein on the wall above them very much. To which Picasso famously replied: “Everybody says that she does not look like it. […]

by John Helmer - Friday, January 30th, 2004
No Comments »

Napoleon’s Foreign Minister – Charles-Maurice Talleyrand-Perigord – once said that a man has been given eyes in the front of his head so that he can look forward, instead of backward. When Napoleon discovered that Talleyrand was betraying him to his enemies, Napoleon told him to his face he was “so much shit in a […]

by John Helmer - Saturday, December 20th, 2003
No Comments »

Earlier this year respectable western newspapers told their readers that Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man, was a close neighbour of President Vladimir Putin’s. This bit of geography was a plant from Khodorkovsky’s public relations machine, intended to convince those Americans to whom Khodorkovsky was trying to sell his Yukos shares, that Khodorkovsky and Putin […]

by John Helmer - Monday, December 15th, 2003
No Comments »

It takes times of despotism, when the best and brightest of a country’s elite are obliged to fawn, flatter, and commit crimes to make their fortunes, that a sensitive man discovers that virtues are usually only vices in disguise. At any rate, that’s what La Rochefoucauld – ducal courtier, failed plotter, brilliant aphorist in the […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, November 20th, 2003
No Comments »

MOSCOW – When a man runs for the office of Russian prime minister, he must first learn to crawl. Former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov mistakenly imagined he was on a high horse, when in early October he received a delegation from United States oil company ExxonMobil and allowed his guests to announce publicly that the […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, November 18th, 2003
No Comments »

MOSCOW – Napoleon Bonaparte was the greatest tactician in European history. Russian President Vladimir Putin needs to understand how similar Russia’s situation, and his own, are to the circumstances facing France, and to Napoleon, when the country was encircled by hostile powers, led by the British; its treasury emptied by corruption and civil war; its […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, November 6th, 2003
No Comments »

The idea of fiscal justice – that taxes should be paid in proportion to the taxpayer’s means -can produce bloody rebellions and even revolutions. But not in Russia. What then-President Boris Yeltsin did in the 1990s was an old trick he might have cribbed from the histories of the old regimes of France if he […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, October 28th, 2003
No Comments »

MOSCOW – There’s nothing more ungainly than newspapers, when their sanctimoniousness is aroused, and they try walking with their feet in their mouths. Call this the Duranty phenomenon. Walter Duranty was the New York Times journalist who won a Pulitzer prize, journalism’s highest award in the US, for his reporting on Russia in 1931. Duranty […]

by John Helmer - Monday, October 27th, 2003
No Comments »