Nick Paton Walsh
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/ 20 March 2006

A guide to the Kremlin

When Irina Khakamada, the femme fatale of Russia’s political opposition, decided to run against Vladimir Putin in the presidential election in March 2004, she asked a Russian public relations firm how she should ”project her brand”. A five-hour brainstorming session yielded only one sure-fire strategy: stage the kidnapping of your husband and child.

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/ 7 November 2005

Plans to revive ‘railway of bones’

It was one of the most ambitious projects of the Stalin era, known as the ”railway of bones”’. At least 10 people a day died during the four years of its construction, but unlike most of Uncle Joe’s grand designs, it was never completed and now sits unfinished in the tundra, an icy road to nowhere.

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/ 27 May 2005

Central Asia pipeline opens

A £2,2-billion pipeline that will deliver a million barrels of crude oil a day to the Mediterranean Sea, and is set to become a vital gateway for central Asian energy resources to the West, opened on Wednesday. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline will run for 1 760km from the Azerbaijani capital through Georgia to the Turkish port, and through two of the most politically turbulent countries in the region.

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/ 16 May 2005

Immortal Kombat

”You get respect with this,” says Gennadi Lazuein, an aviation millionaire, as I drive his Kombat armoured tank-ette along the roads of St Petersburg. As frightened faces stare at me and our looming vehicle from their greying, battered Ladas, I see what he means. The Kombat T-98 closely resembles a large security van with lots of extra shiny knobs and lights.

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/ 21 April 2005

History taken to task by Putin

The history books in Russia may have to be rewritten yet again. President Vladimir Putin has ordered a review of all history textbooks after one controversial book asked students to debate whether he is a dictator running a police state. The Russian president has written to the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences demanding […]

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/ 8 April 2005

‘Russia could fall apart’

President Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff warned this week that Russia could break up into several different countries and proposed the creation of “super regions” to be headed by Kremlin appointees. Dmitri Medvedev said, unless political and business elites work together, ”Russia could disappear as a united country”’.

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/ 2 September 2004

Russia, Chechnya and holy war

The war has lasted for most of 10 years and, with each year that passes, Islamist separatists have had to sink to ever greater depths of brutality to get their cause noticed. Chechnya — a war the Kremlin reignited to boost the political career of an unknown former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin — today returns to haunt the Russian president. Moscow has allowed an enemy with a definable objective to morph into extremists who are ready to die — and kill.

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/ 26 February 2004

Russian-style Harrods for Red Square

It is enough to make Lenin turn in his mausoleum, where he lies only metres away across Red Square. A Moscow businessman has bought a large stake in GUM, the legendary Soviet-era retail store in Red Square opposite the Kremlin, and plans to turn the symbol of Communist Party privileges into a supermarket.

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/ 28 November 2003

Georgia’s opposition looks to the future

Georgia’s opposition has pledged to put up a single presidential candidate for the forthcoming elections after the resignation of Eduard Shevardnadze in an attempt to shore up popular support for the difficult programme of reform ahead. Opposition leader Mikhail Saakashvili said the candidate would be selected before the end of the week.