The idea that a Russian would one day by trying to smuggle food into a NATO member simply would not have occured to me.
If you look at a graphical representation of Russian inflation, you get some idea of the scale of the improvement.
Mairbek Vachagaev, Chechnya's representative in Moscow, says that the Russian leadership has cooked up the idea of a Saudi connection to engage American interest and sympathy.
But last year people close to the Kremlin floated the idea of combining all Russian welfare charities into one big one to be headed by none other than Mrs Putin.
Mrs Merkel took pains to dispel this idea, turning down a Russian proposal to add a third pipe to the Baltic gas pipeline.
The idea of long periods of economical and technological development, spanning 40-50 years, goes back to Nicolai Kondratieff, a Russian economist, who first published the idea of long waves in 1925.
Even during recent negotiations to secure funding to fend off a collapse of their banking system and restructure a Russian loan, Cyprus balked at the idea of exchanging support for exploration and production rights to their offshore claims.
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To keep its grip on power, the Kremlin has now come up with a different idea: modernisation to renew the Russian economy without changing its political system.
Policymakers knew America needed its own force of long-range missiles to deter a Russian attack, but deterrence was a new idea so they also wanted to have the protection provided by real defenses.
He was staying in Moscow to look for financiers for a business idea that would do for the Russian market what mortgage traders had done on Wall Street since the eighties: pool and repackage loans for investors in one massive turbine of debt and capital.
However, I can well imagine just such a Russian company thinking that it might be a good idea to offer middle aged businessmen the thrill of a candlelit dinner with a pretty dancing girl: nothing physical, just that enjoyable evening.
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Last month, Maz Shatto's mother Yulia Kuzmina, went on Russian state TV to complain that she had no idea her children had been taken to the US. She said she wanted to raise her surviving son, although it later emerged she was a recovering alcoholic.
Translated from the Russian, Lavrov said that the he understands the idea is for the EU to develop plans for humanitarian convoys, and that nothing would be done with NATO on the ground unless the United Nations Security Council said a ground invasion to oust Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi was within their authority.
The idea of westerners coming in to help run Russian cities, or even whole regions, still seems implausible.
But he has also been criticised for buying Chelsea and not Russian football club, although Mann says it was an idea he explored.
However, politicians in the region are keen to break free of Russian influence and seem to be warming up to the idea of opening up their local reserves to foreign energy companies.
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Even though Soviet communism as an idea may have failed, its interaction with the Russian population contains a powerful warning.
His sideburns had been trimmed in preparation for the presentation of his idea for a private loan-backing firm, a Russian Fannie Mae, as he called it.
The idea of using the Arab League to name and shame the Russian government never occurred to me.
As Novaya Gazeta claimed, Berezovsky "was there when the idea arose of putting a sensible security services agent on to the Russian throne".
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Not everyone is happy with this proposal: the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexy II, is reported to be against the idea of using music he believes many people still associate with repression and state-imposed atheism.
But the study developed into Mr Pipes's best-known idea: that the Soviet Union was better understood as a successor to past Russian imperialism than through Kremlinology, sociology or other modish approaches.
This is why the idea of full-scale anti-Soviet (or, now, anti-Russian) missile defense was always such a red herring.
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The idea that a smaller submarine could have struck the Kursk and sailed away, whilst the Russian giant sank to the bottom is difficult to imagine.
But the idea of some sort of deposit grab returned to the fore after Cyprus' attempt to gain Russian financial aid failed.
This friction has emboldened those Russians who would prefer to stay out, either because they dislike the idea of Russia joining anything, or because they fear for vulnerable sectors, such as agriculture: Russian produce will struggle to compete with subsidised European fare.
One upshot of this gambit is renewed energy behind another hardy perennial on the anti-nuclear community's agenda: the idea of "de-alerting" of U.S. -- and, ostensibly, Russian -- nuclear forces.
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