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.