> An impressive account of how, among other things, the liberal media are
> going into the tank on this.
That's completely true. But it's not just the media -- everyone in the West who is anyone in the Russia scene is on Khodorkovsky's side.
Western government Russia experts are made up of (a) ex-Soviet Union specialists in the security establishments, who have been filled with unfocused anti-totalitarianism looking for an outlet ever since 1989. This gives them the boogey man they've been craving and half predicting; and (b) all the economists and politicians who were ever involved in Russian "reform" in the 1990s, none of whom have ever issued a mea culpa, and all of whom still crave a way of proving definiatively they didn't do anything wrong. This is the ultimate out. It allows them to say "See, Yeltsin wasn't that bad -- it's better than this! This is totalitarianism!"
In the end, the Western media are the easiest ones to persuade. After all, the prime minister just resigned in protest, and there are many other high government functionaries who support him who give his story to the press. In Russia, these are all seen as the last holdovers of the Yeltsin era, and therefore their protests are discounted in advance. But in the West, being Yeltsin-era government figures makes them doubly credible. Those are the only people our reporters and politicians ever got close to and trusted. And they showed their good nature by doing everything we told them to.
To these widespread pre-existing dispositions has been harnessed what looks like a very well-prepared and well-funded PR and lobbying campaign. So now you have people like Soros talking about how this could "knock Russia out of the G-8" on the eve of an EU council meeting and McCain in the Senate denouncing Russia's slide into "neo-imperialism" and demanding the President react.
Khodorkovsky doesn't seem to have accidentally fallen into this trap by just hoping that no one would notice he was getting politically involved if he did it gradually. It seems like he very carefully prepared for exactly this confrontation. His goal seems to have been that, if he got arrested, he would immediately cause so much trouble politically and economically for Russia from the US and the EU that Putin would have to back down. It's possible it could work.
Of course it could also go wrong in lots of ways. And it might be downright meglomanical and nuts. But it looks very well planned and executed. And the press is the easiest link in the chain. It's not only that paid flacks can be easily hired to write op-ed pieces. It's simply that if every Russia maven in the West denounces something, the Western press will take their point of view without prodding. Especially when the most esteemed old hands of the press were all Yeltsin era reporters themselves, and so are all their best sources.
This is what we get for never having been able to re-write the history of the Yelstin era. It's a remarkable part of the news/ideology cycle. When the truth comes out, not only is it too late to do anything, it's too late to be news. So nobody in mainstream politics registers it. And when it's time to act again, they instinctively reactivate the same old world view because it was never publicly discredited.
Michael