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...
The train was departing at 11: 23 p.m. At 11:06 p.m., I had just bounded out of my building, and was standing on the side of the road, hand outstretched. A small sedan heeded my desperate call. "Can...
Welcome to the re-launching of Natalia's column. It will run every other Sunday, and will now be more personal, for we have decreed that it will be so. Forever and ever - or until she gets bored with...
Last month, Mykola Azarov made Ukraine look like a wonderfully modern and enlightened nation when he famously said that conducting reforms "is not a woman's business." Since then, plenty of people...
