Category: Access

An absurdly generous friend put us up in a hotel new to the city, The Peninsula, where a bottle of mineral water from room service would set you back $28.  Back in Palermo, that would buy me a whole roast lamb – dinner for eight to ten guests, or a wild sea bass of mammoth proportions. One of the functions I was to attend in Paris was a meeting of expat Republicans – “Republicans” as in the GOP, not in the European sense of cowardly regicides – and, when I got there, the contrast could not have been more striking. ...

Oh, how it made me wish that our late friend Curtis Cate were still here, living in the Rue des Saints-Pères and gesticulating awkwardly when lamenting this or that Soviet ploy.  I went into a tobacconist’s under the windows of his old apartment and asked the lady at the counter if she remembered Monsieur Cate, the American writer.  She said she did, supplying me with a sour smile, a packet of unfiltered Gitanes, and an English newspaper. The news was that Putin had cancelled his visit to Paris, where the new Russian “Spiritual and Cultural Center” – an almost unimaginably...

Attentive readers may recall my post back in April, “Just Don’t Call it Praetorian,” in which I compared the newly formed National Guard, Russia’s president’s 350,000-strong personal army, to Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (SS) in Nazi Germany.  One reason for its creation, I argued, was to counterbalance the army of Ramzan Kadyrov’s Kremlin loyalists, historically a clone of Röhm’s Sturmabteilung (SA). Now another reason has come to the fore, and it deserves a separate post – especially in view of the fact that I first broached the subject with an article in the June 2011 issue of a magazine that the founder...

Like any massive fraud, whether successful or unsuccessful, Russia’s recent parliamentary election is an interesting subject.  Fraud, swindle, pyramid–perpetrated or operated by all sorts of impostors, flimflam artists, and snake oil salesmen–where would world literature be without them?  Thomas Mann’s Hochstapler, or confidence man, in Confessions of Felix Krull is alone worth a million real-life fraud victims. Conrad would never have written Chance, the masterwork that pulled him out of obscurity, without its central character, the swindler Smith de Barral.  Gogol would not have written Dead Souls without Chichikov, the spectre of Western monopoly capitalism in the guise of a...