Of Thieves and a Gentleman

A lot of water has passed under the bridges over the Moskva river since our last issue of the magazine. 

Premier Sergei Vadimovich Stepashin was fired—the fourth premier sacked by Tsar Boris in the last 18 months. Take heart, Vadimych! As the old blatnaya (thieves’) song has it, “the music didn’t play long.” Stepashin had to put up with Kremlin intrigues for less than 100 days. 

What else? Oh yes, speaking of thieves, a few billion dollars of Russian money were apparently washed through the Bank of New York. And bandits  from Chechnya invaded Dagestan, launching another deadly conflict in Russia’s Caucasus region. This was followed by a series of terrorist bomb attacks in Moscow, which, at press time, had claimed nearly 200 lives.