By John Helmer, Moscow If you believe that in July 1941, a few days after the start of the German invasion, Lavrenty Beria was telling Josef Stalin that one of their NKVD agents had gotten her information “from the horse’s mouth, as the peasants say”, this book is for you. Actually, the expression is American […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, December 6th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow Spy novels are a dime a dozen – make that £10 before they are remaindered; the fact that some of them are written by ex-spies or counter-espionage agents doesn’t make them more precious for their veracity or insight. What makes Stella Rimington (right) a cut above (or below) is what she […]

by John Helmer - Saturday, October 27th, 2012
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The inaugural award of the Russian Register for the Revival of all Reading (RRROAR) has been announced today. According to the citation, Dances with Bears is “attracting unprecedented resources to the written word. This deserves the recognition that it is doing more than any other published source in print or on the internet to revive […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, June 28th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow Now we move on from the lesson of how to be victorious over big people and bullies when still small —that’s for getting through the daytimes with ВЛАДИМИР ВИЗАНТИЙСКИЙ – to the lesson of how to write a short sentence and say everything that must be said at the same time. […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow Quadraturin was the stuff which, when squeezed out of a tube and painted on the walls of an 8 square-metre Moscow room, turned it into a much larger one. Biggerized it — is the translator’s term from the Russian. Russian politicians have been using it for years, long before the arrival […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow Christopher Hitchens, who died on Thursday at 62 years of age, described me many years ago as “an old personal enemy of mine”. Hitchens wore the inimical declarations of others as self-awarded Victoria Crosses, as if his bravado under the fire he inflicted deserved more than the money he was paid […]

by John Helmer - Sunday, December 18th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow The Financial Times, a London newspaper, recommends that under your Christmas tree you put a book called Snowdrops by A.D. Miller, who was the Moscow correspondent of The Economist between 2004 and 2007. According to the recommendation, “it’s a sinister, seductive read that paints a murky moral portrait of the new […]

by John Helmer - Monday, December 5th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow The big difference between the penny dreadful and the novels of the great crime writers is not the characters who wind up dead, nor who did it to them, nor how; but rather what truth the tale reveals about the society in which the crime takes place and the humankind responsible […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow If you are just back from the beach with your sachel of books dog-eared, riddled with beach sand, even read to the finish, you may have missed the latest in this year’s crop of thrillers with Russians for villains. Mark Mills’s House of the Hanged was released in July. The Independent […]

by John Helmer - Sunday, September 4th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow When one of the cleverest of international business intelligence agents retires from the secret world to write thrillers for a well-known London publisher, there are bound to be many in Moscow who are curious to know what he chooses to reveal about Russia’s oligarchs, their business practices and personal habits. If […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, June 7th, 2011
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