Russia

“One would think the Tsar is back!” This is how a colleague covering the G8 summit in Saint Petersburg in July 2006 commented after a visit by President Vladimir Putin to the facilities provided for journalists covering the “historic event.” Historic because this was the first time that Russia, admitted as a full member of the club of “great powers” in 1997, was hosting the summit.

Putin wore his usual disdainful grin like the man who broke the bank in Monte Carlo.

To show that Russia is back, Putin had chosen the Konstantinovsky Palace as the venue for the G8 summit. The elegant chateau had been started in 1714 by Peter The Great as a Russian answer to the Versailles Palace in France.

The chairman of Russia’s Lukoil oil giant, Ravil Maganov, has died after falling from a hospital window in Moscow, reports say.

The company confirmed his death but said only that Maganov, 67, had “passed away following a severe illness”.

Russian media said he was being treated at Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital and died of his injuries.

Maganov is the latest of a number of high-profile business executives to die in mysterious circumstances.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader who oversaw detente with the West, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, has died in a Moscow hospital at the age of 91.

Gorbachev’s policy of “glasnost” towards the West, underpinned by summits with US President Ronald Reagan to curb the nuclear arms race, paved the way for the end of the Cold War, made him one of the most influential figures of the late 20th century. At home, however, his move to decentralise the Soviet economy, a strategy know as “perestroika”, precipitated an economic collapse that hastened the end of the Soviet Union.

A 33-year-old film featuring a naked secretary and a head-shaped cake turns out to be one of the best explanations of the ideas driving the Russian leader.

It could have been any sleepy industrial town anywhere across the old Soviet Union. A weary out-of-town businessman enters the office of the local factory manager and gets his first hint that things aren’t quite right when he sees the manager’s secretary typing away, completely naked. When the dumbstruck visitor alerts the manager that his secretary is completely nude, the manager looks and dismissively shrugs — “well, so she is” — before continuing with business as usual.

Thus begins the main character’s descent into an increasingly bizarre realm where he, along with the audience, struggles to determine what is real and what is not.