We interrupt your blog to briefly note how damn proud we are that not one but two regular Russia! contributors, Daria Vaisman and Boris Kachka, have landed major book deals... within days of each other. Let’s dive under the jump and meet them properly.

Yesterday, Mikhail Khodorkovsky – the oil tycoon who has found his empire stripped bare and himself in Siberia after developing a hint of a political ambition in 2003 – returned to Moscow for the first time in years. The occasion was not joyous: there are new charges in the case. Khodorkovsky is now more than halfway into his ludicrous nine-year sentence; are the authorities planning a display of magnanimity or a show trial to keep him locked up into the 2020s? For once, we actually picked up the phone and asked someone: Robert Amsterdam, the world-renowned lawyer who represented Khodorkovsky in the original trial. Here's his take.

Writing about Russia always carries a whiff of proselytizing. The reason is simple: people tend to either be obsessed with it (that includes the obsessive loathing, too) or know next to nothing about it; the first group are invariably the ones doing the writing for the second one. As a result, even the best writers are forced to pick from a woefully tiny toolbox of memes and metaphors that would make the material “sing” to the general public. Below, the five journalistic devices we never, ever want to see used again.

There are only a few days left to vote (via comments right here, on YouTube, or, if you’re a big shot, on the password-protected Snob website) in our Rolling R poll, which will bestow the coveted award “For General Excellence in Acting Russian” on one of the five Hollywood performances of 2008. Let’s see which way the public opinion is leaning in the meantime.

The notion of an “information war” in the wake of the actual Russian-Georgian hostilities has gotten a lot of attention in its time. One would be forgiven for thinking that some amazingly complicated PR strategies are being deployed on both sides. In actuality, the “war” mostly consists of both Russia and Georgia trying to impress a who-hit-whom-first narrative on a completely indifferent American public, and doing it in the clumsiest manner possible.

We’ll come right out and say it: alongside Zemfira and Splean, Mumiy Troll are one of the very, very few Russian rock acts we’re not embarrassed to crank up with Brits or Yanks within earshot. And Mumiy (pronounced like roomy) Troll might be the worldliest of the three, what with lead singer Ilya Lagutenko’s multilingual punning (he’s fluent in Mandarin, among other things) and no-translation-needed feline yowl. 2009 brings the band’s first attempt to conquer the U.S. in earnest – and seemingly on their own terms.

Georgia the U.S. state has produced R.E.M., B-52s and Pylon; now its oft-beleaguered namesake in the Caucasus is beginning to catch up.

Watching black-helmeted military police subdue protesters in the streets of Riga this Tuesday felt shocking on two distinct levels. For one thing, these are the streets on which I grew up – hey, is that my favorite coffee house they’re smashing? Far more jarring, however, is the gulf between the protests’ intensity and what I have, in my 16 years there, come to know and partly absorb: the Latvian temperament.

Of all iconic objects of the Soviet era — the orb of the Sputnik, the needle of the Ostankino TV tower — none speaks to the Russian heart as clearly and loudly as the Glass.

As to what it says, well, take a guess: with a volume of exactly 250 grams, the Glass happens to divide the equally classic 750-gram bottle of vodka evenly between three friends. Hence, the whispered invitation heard daily around every Soviet liquor store: "Третьим будешь?" (Wanna be the third one?)

Protest rallies continue across Russia over a new tariff that, as of January 12, aims to bail out domestic car industry by making imports prohibitively expensive. Here's a short thing I wrote about them for The New Republic. It basically cheers the return of public protest into Russian life but warns against idealizing the protesters: "These are not harbingers of a Georgia- or Ukraine-style 'color revolution.'"