By John Helmer, Moscow If you could make more money turning bananas into ballet, it’s likely that you couldn’t do it in places where the supply of bananas is plentiful and the price cheap, but the demand for ballet non-existent. But what if in places where the supply of ballet dancers is large and their […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, November 24th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow Global warming should be so good for Russia that, as long as St. Petersburg can be jacked up by a metre or so, it may pay for the Kremlin to accelerate the melting of the Arctic ice-pack, if it can. But will that be so good for the beverages Russians like […]

by John Helmer - Monday, November 14th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow Is Vladimir Kekhman going to lose his bananas because the Joint Fruit Company (JFC) he owns, Russia’s banana trade leader, cannot, or will not, pay $16.2 million in commercial damages awarded since August by the UK High Court in London? Kekhman, who doubles as director of the Mikhailovsky Theatre in St. […]

by John Helmer - Friday, November 11th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow Carbonated water was an 18th century invention in England, associated with the brewing of beer. Fizz came in just over a hundred years later in New Orleans, when carbonated water was added to a cocktail of gin, lemon, lime, egg white and sugar, stirred. After years of trying fizzy drinks from […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow The Russian government has made good on an earlier threat to penalize grain exports if the export tonnage exceeds the level that threatens domestic supplies and triggers grain and bread price increases before the December parliamentary elections. Fear of bread price rises detonating voter discontent first appeared a year ago, when […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow Joint Fruit Company (JFC), once the owner of Russia’s largest fleet of banana boats and the largest importer of bananas in the Russian market, is slipping on something much bigger than one of its own fruit skins. But the company and its owner, St. Petersburg entrepreneur Vladimir Kekhman, insist everything is […]

by John Helmer - Friday, September 23rd, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow In case you’ve been missing the action this summer: the Russian wheat harvest is proving to be so abundant, Moscow experts and grain traders are forecasting that exports will reach up to 23.5 million tonnes in the trading season which runs until June 30, next year. Alexander Korbut, spokesman for the […]

by John Helmer - Sunday, September 11th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow President Boris Yeltsin presided over the greatest slaughter of Russian livestock since Adolf Hitler crossed the Soviet frontier in the summer of 1941. In the five years between 1992 and 1997 19.6 million head of cattle were killed. That compares with 2 million killed during Hitler’s initial invasion, and 16.6 million […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow If you’re feeling peckish, but the price of fish is too high to swallow, whom do you call? Gennady Timchenko (right image), that’s who – the man who has settled with several English newspapers out of court that he’s not a friend of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and benefits commercially in […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, July 6th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow For those with a taste for the burlesque, politicians speaking for the cash interests of the perishable food trade are hard to match. The smaller the politician’s country of origin, the louder the petomane, and the bigger the pratfall. Russia’s chief food inspector Gennady Onishchenko (left image) yesterday ordered the ban […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, June 23rd, 2011
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