I met an expat lady at GUM, Moscow's fanciest department store, the other day, and wound up horrifying her. She had asked me for directions in Russian, and I had noticed her accent, and spoke to her...
Famous journalist Oleg Kashin, who works at Russia's leading business newspaper, Kommersant, and lives in my neighbourhood, was badly beaten over the weekend in Moscow. So badly beaten - that doctors...
The other day, I saw a pretty classic drunken fight. I was just at the beginning at what I assumed would be a delicious nap - having drunk a concoction that contained heated-up rum, coconut milk and...
A few months ago, I insulted someone horribly. Darting about outside in a helpless panic, I had accosted a young man who was, by the looks of him, just trying to get home after a long day. "Do you...
It was only a matter of time before ousted Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov became re-cast as the victim of "the dark forces that govern Russia" (as one person put it to me in an e-mail, preferring not to...
Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin once wrote a brilliant story that is the very definition of "shot." In it, a nobleman riding alone sometime in autumn is nearly run down by a drunk peasant on his horse. The...
Liza Fomkina and her aunt - a woman suffering from a disability - went missing on September 13 after taking two dogs on a walk in Orekhovo-Zuevo, a town in the Moscow region. The aunt's body was...
When you're doomed to lead a perpetually exciting life, playwriting is not the best way of attaining peace and balance. This may surprise people who only know Russian drama through painfully earnest...
I was clicking my boot heels (autumn has suddenly decided to make its appearance in formerly heat-struck Moscow - with a maniacal vengeance) down the broken pavement, splashing through the puddles,...
By the time my birthday rolled around this year, I was away from Moscow for a while - taking care of family business, mostly. Because the situation surrounding the health of a relative in Kiev was...
