Daily Archives: March 6, 2007

It seems that we can add another body to the pile. Last Friday, Kommersant military affairs correspondent, Ivan Safronov mysteriously fell to his death from a stairway window of his apartment building. At first, Safronov’s death was ruled a suicide, but Taganka police confirmed today that a criminal investigation has been opened to probe the incident.

The incident was not without a few witnesses. According Kommersant:

Two students who live in the building across the courtyard witnessed his death. “At about 4:00, my friend and I stepped out onto the balcony to smoke,” recounted Lena, a psychology student at the Sholokhov Pedagogical Institute. “Suddenly we heard a thud, like snow falling off the rooftop. It was almost empty in the courtyard, and we immediately noticed a man lying directly in front of the canopy over the second entranceway to building No. 9. He was lying on ..read more

Talk about a script writing itself! Sony and Warner Bros. who are both developing films about the Alexander Litvinenko murder might just get their third act after all. Johnny Depp won’t need to look too deep to get inspiration for his role as Sasha the Spy. The shooting, ahem . . . carjacking, or is it mugging, no wait, shooting of Paul Joyal has revived a case that by all appearances seemed all but closed. Last week, Paul JoyalLitvinenko acquaintance, security expert and “a longtime critic of the Putin regime,” was shot in his DC suburban neighborhood shortly after he uttered these words on Dateline NBC: “A message has been communicated to anyone who wants to speak out against the Kremlin: ‘If you do, no matter who you are, where you are, we will find you and we will silence you — in the most ..read more

Arkady Ostrovsky’s article “A Difference in Class” in Sunday’s Financial Times proves to be an interesting read. Ostrovsky, who left from the Soviet Union as a youth only to return years later as FT’s Moscow correspondent, ventures out to discover what has and hasn’t changed in his native Moscow. Sixteen years of capitalism has made Moscow look like another planet. All the shops and homely d?cor that stir in Ostrovsky’s memory are long gone. “The bakery with its smell of freshly baked buns for 3 kopecks” he writes “is now an Asian fusion restaurant, charging 50 cents for a slice of bread. The cafeteria on the ground floor of a Stalinist building where my mother took me after my music classes to drink sweet, milky coffee has undergone several transformations, often accompanied by mafia shoot-outs. The ice-cream parlour is now a beauty parlour and the ..read more