March of the (Red) Penguins

The Pittsburgh Penguins once took a 50% stake in CSKA Moscow. It was all fun, games and strippers for cheerleaders—until dead bodies showed up in the parking lot.

You can build a throne with bayonets, but you can't sit on it for long.
Boris Yeltsin

Russia of the 1990s (the лихие девяностые—or the ‘wild’ nineties, as Russians call them) had absolutely everything. A coup d’etat, mass privatization, currency whiplash, war—the fall of the Soviet Union was less a linear implosion and more of a bucking bronco. What may s…