The traditional Prime Minister’s farewell speech delivered to the state Duma by Vladimir Putin was for the most part, boring with one major exception. He listed various programs, projects and promises, but never once indicated that they are only feasible if oil prices continue to rise year on year. The problem is that Russia’s economic dependence on the oil trade is not just important, it is critical

Assuming that the tour lasted for two weeks and that the campaigners took two flights a day, spending about four hours in the air, while for the rest of the day the jet was stationed in a heated hangar, the expenditures would total 13.5 million roubles. And this amount includes the jet costs only. There’s no doubt that the total cost of the tour was much higher. Where did the money come from?

Sergei Polonsky declared a hunger strike stemming from the raid on the Kutuzovsky Mile development project, and it has become a bottomless pit of Internet folklore. He brought a wealth of attention to himself by swearing profusely, lying under the wheels of a truck and demanding that “Arkady” come...

So we have started losing them. A lot of them - all over the world. Three GLONASS satellites were lost on 5 December. A Geo-IK-2 geodetic military satellite was lost on 1 February. The Express-AM4 space satellite was lost on 18 August. On 24 August, the M-12M Progress met with an accident while being launched by the Soyuz-U booster rocket and was destroyed...

Part 1. The Transaction I met Marina Marlenovna, director of an auditing company intriguingly named Narnia, at the Sverdlovsk Province Arbitration Court, during a recess. I told her, “Your statement sounded like an Italian opera aria – I...

The next summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) will take place in Honolulu in the US, and the following one in 2012 will be held in Vladivostok, the capital of the Primorye (Maritime) Province. Only three years ago, the...

The Federal Service for Environmental, Technological, and Nuclear Oversight (Rostekhnadzor) has confirmed that construction of the Boguchanskaya Hydro Power Plant violates existing laws. The key complaint against Russia’s largest...

Vladislav Inozemtsev, the director of the Center for research of the post-industrial society: The current crisis has been caused more with our internal reasons than with the global influence. Even if the crisis in the West had not been so...

Actions by government and the task of minimization of consequences of the financial crisis have very little in common. First, we need to define what the financial crisis is like in Russia. If we talk of fall of the stock exchange indices,...

The crisis has affected some players in the media market. That way, expenses of “Nezavisimaya Gazeta” had to be reduced for 30% and about 50 staff members were laid off, as reported by the periodical owner and editor Konstantin Remchukov....

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has given his reading of the ways of overcoming the financial crisis. The President has called Europe to making a new global order where the role by the US would be reduced. Right at the moment when the...

Our elite are no afraid of the crisis, as it enables them to complete the process of sharing out the assets to their advantage. Stability is a good time with one exception: it’s impossible to share out really big money without being...

This week the financial crisis has become global and really terrible. The governments of Great Britain, Germany, and Benelux countries had to save the largest banks through buying up their stock (which is better to be called...

Nationalization of “Fanny” and “Freddie”, the US largest mortgage agencies, was unprecedented news. While in Russia and in a number of European countries the process of privatization and nationalization is painful, bit still usual, in the...

The crisis has passed with us. The resources, accumulated during the years of oil and gas boom, have helped fixing holes in the banking system and in the stock market. Economists will be discussing for long the price the country has had to...