“Lord knows where that went,” Boris Yeltsin croaked to one of his Kremlin aides sometime last September. Yeltsin, according to Kremlin sources, was replying to a query from the International Monetary Fund on the expenditure of nearly two billion dollars worth of an IMF “tranche” targeted to stave off impending Russian financial disaster in the...
The news for both the “Father of Russian Democracy” and his “friend Bill” was equally bad in the second week of September. A wave of bombings had killed some 300 Russians, murdered by an elusive terrorist gang as they slept in their beds (with some people pointing an accusing finger at the Kremlin; see “Banking...
On Wednesday, September 1, a homemade bomb exploded on the third level of the Manezh Square underground shopping mall—dubbed “Luzhkov’s pyramid” by critics of the Moscow mayor’s taste in architecture—in the heart of Russia’s ancient capital, only yards away from the red brick walls of the Kremlin. Forty-one people were injured, but none thus far...