Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

Not everyone will be in a condition to toast death's imminence with champagne, as Anton Chekhov did.

Killing someone, Sleed discovers, is "like winning at Russian rou­lette and having the taste of gunmetal forever on your tongue be­cause even if you win, you lose."

To the slopes clings Clee Hill village which, until it closed, had Shrop­shire's highest pub (called "The Kremlin" because, via the radar aerials on the hill, its juke box could pick up Radio Moscow).

As the news broke of the upheaval at home, Lenin became increasingly desperate. He even considered trying to reach Russia on a false pass­port, as a Swedish deaf mute. His ever-practical wife reminded him that this was bound to fail because of his habit of talking — in Russian, an­grily, about politics — in his sleep... Lenin lambasted an anti-war article in The Economist

— dismissing it caustically as "a journal which speaks for British millionaires" — on the ground that the authors wanted peace only because they were "afraid of revolution".

"Hitler nudged, so did Stalin," writes Mr Sunstein.

The Russians are very good at linking two unrelated issues in a nego­tiation.

Mr Correa, who has a respectable approval rating of 42%, is not a candidate. He is counting on Lenin Moreno, a former vice-presi­dent, and his running mate, Jorge Glas, the current vice-president, to carry on his "citizens' revolution". Mr Moreno, who shares his alarming first name with 18,000 other Ecuadoreans, hopes to win in the first round by capturing the bulk of Mr Correa's support and adding to it.

The first Russian to inquire about political asylum in Britain may have been Tsar Ivan the Terrible, who wrote to Queen Elizabeth I in 1570 asking whether she would take him in if things got too hairy in Moscow. (Eliza­beth replied that he could come if he paid his own way.) Ivan never came, but England has since offered refuge to generations of Russian political exiles. Alexander Herzen, Russia's first socialist, came to London in the 1850s and published his newspaper Kolokol

(Bell), which was smuggled back into Russia. Lenin lived briefly in Bloomsbury, and is said to have met Stalin at a pub in Clerkenwell. Today London is home both to Mr Putin's cronies and to opponents of his regime trying to lay the groundwork for the day it vanishes.

In cheap action films the bad guy is taken out by force. In the bet­ter sort, he falls victim to his own hubris. The great risk, though, is that Europe and Russia find themselves in a film noir, where the villain's plot fails but takes everyone down with it.

Having been caught off guard by online protest movements, many gov­ernments are now investing heavily in their web-based propaganda infrastructure. Russian government agencies, for instance, are not just good at setting up social-media bots and other spamming weapons to drown out genuine online discourse. They also employ armies of "trolls" to fight on their behalf in Western comment sections and Twitter feeds.

J. K. Galbraith, an economist, argued that there was not much difference between state planning as practised by the Russians and corporate plan­ning as practised by General Motors.

A mild winter and robust European Union policy have blunted the edge of what was once Vladimir Putin's most effective for­eign-policy weapon: the politicised export of gas.

By Khrushchev's death in 1971, more than 125m lived in the Khrushchev- ki buildings. Most were not meant to last more than 25 years (by then, presumably, the bright communist future would have dawned.

Lenin is said to have sneered that a capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him. The quote may be spurious, but it contains a grain of truth. Capitalists quite often invent the technology that destroys their own business.

Biographies of Stalin and Mikhail Gorbachev abound, but nobody has written seriously about Leonid Brezhnev, on whose watch the Soviet Union sank into drunken decay.

A fortuitously placed wart on the penis of the "mad monk" Rasputin, whose scandalous behaviour and bad advice helped bring about the dy­nasty's downfall, is cited as a possible reason for his success with aris­tocratic women.

Ukrainian president must choose between a rich Russian dinner with lots of vodka and with the risk of discovering that he has been captured and his car stolen.

In pre-war Russia, for example, the central bank was called the "Red Cross of the bourse" Mr Obama is using measures associated with Soviet central planning out of desperation: he cannot get climate laws through Congress, so executive orders are his only weapons.

Surely no true, law-abiding Russian could side with the enemies of his country?

Dick Cheney, or so his critics aver, became George W. Bush's Rasputin. The Russians are a sentimental lot.

On switching off the light after reading "War and Peace", Edmund Wilson, an American critic, would find his bedroom magically "full of people".