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“... to make ends meet in murkier ways, or migrate. Politically speaking, widespread collusion with the Yeltsin regime lamed much resistance to its successor. In such conditions, it was now the corruption and commercialisation of the intelligentsia itself that became a target of the country’s leading ironist, in Pelevin’s scathing portrait of Generation P. But ...”

“... had been hastily updated to include new sanctions in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Boris Johnson said the bill would ‘tighten the noose around Putin’s regime’. Anti-corruption experts are more circumspect: the measures are piecemeal and there is little sign of meaningfully increased investment in enforcement. A veteran financial ...”

“... threat to the Party leadership: although the Young Turks who organise the Front in Moscow, such as Boris Kagarlitsky, have argued that ‘conditions are not yet ready to replace the one-party system with a multi-party one,’ it is implicit in their arguments that they favour this transition. The July Party Conference was a disappointment for the liberal ...”

“... facility at Sarov wrote that 800 mg of polonium-210 was being shipped to the US every month. Boris Zhuikov, the head of the Radioisotope Laboratory at the Institute of Nuclear Research in Moscow, was quoted in the Washington Post in 2007 as stating that 97 per cent of the world’s polonium-210 came from Sarov. The Attlee government decided to build ...”

“... In 1957, Boris Shragin, a young art historian, accompanied a group of foreigners on a visit to the Moscow studio of Aleksandr Gerasimov, the president of the Soviet Academy of Arts. Gerasimov had made his name with fawning neoclassical portraits of Stalin and Voroshilov, and used his position to crush ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘formalist’ artists whose work strayed from the official aesthetic ...”

“... out your weak spot.’ Top jobs followed at banks and TV channels. In 1999 he was invited to join Yeltsin’s presidential administration. Looking more like a designer than a bureaucrat, he stood out from the rest. He was one of the key spin doctors behind the promotion of Putin for president in 2000. Since then, while many of his colleagues have fallen from ...”

“... not only provided bodyguards but also took on the enforcement of commercial contracts. Was Boris Yeltsin’s sale of public resources – oil, gas, diamonds, and copper flogged off at dirt-cheap prices to a few incredulous young bankers – a criminal act? Glenny calls it ‘quite simply, the grandest larceny in history’. The sell-off certainly ...”

“... HQ, where he plans a new Russia for when Putin falls. Until he died in 2013 Down Street was where Boris Berezovsky plotted, or threatened to plot, anti-Putin revolutions. Berezovsky had played a significant role in Litvinenko’s fate. In 1998 Litvinenko, then an investigator into organised crime at the FSB, had betrayed ‘the firm’ when he went public ...”