[lbo-talk] Khodorkovsky's mea cupla

[Chris Doss]

Hopefully this email account will prove more viable.

He's writing under duress, and it might not even be him at all, but even so...
In two parts. When will Sachs fess up? Maybe we should jail him. :)

The Indisputable Crisis of Russian Liberalism

By Mikhail Khodorkovsky

(snip)

Liberal leaders liked to call themselves kamikazes and martyrs, and at the
outset it seems that was indeed the case. By the mid-1990s, however, they had
developed expensive tastes for Mercedes, dachas, villas, night clubs and gold
cards. The stoic fighters for liberalism, who were prepared to die for their
ideals, were superseded by effete bohemians, who did not even attempt to conceal
their indifference towards the fate of ordinary people, the silent masses. This
Bohemian image, coupled with the overt cynicism, did a great deal to discredit
the cause of liberalism.

Liberals told fairytales about how standards of living were getting better and
better because they themselves neither knew nor really understood what life was
like for the majority. Now they have to listen to, and acknowledge, these facts,
and I hope they do so with a sense of shame.

Even regarding their declared values, adherents of liberalism were often
dishonest or inconsistent. For example, they spoke about freedom of speech, and
yet they did everything within their power to establish financial and
administrative control over the media for their own ends. Often this was
justified by reference to the "threat of communism," arguing that the end
justified the means. However, not a word was uttered about the underlying causes
of the "red-brown plague," i.e. the liberal leadership's ignorance of the
people's real problems.

Media outlets choked on the words "the diversified economy of the future," when
in reality Russia remained firmly dependent on raw materials. Needless to say,
the profound technological crisis experienced at this time was a direct
consequence of the Soviet Union's collapse and a sharp drop in investment due to
high inflation. It was the liberals' job to deal with this problem by, inter
alia, recruiting into government strong professionals from the left end of the
political spectrum. But, instead, they preferred to ignore the problem. Is it
any surprise, then, that millions of people who make up the science/technology
intelligentsia (the driving force of the democratic movement in the late 1980s)
now vote for Rodina and the Communist Party?

Dismissing all assertions to the contrary, the liberals always insisted that you
could do whatever you liked with the Russian people, that "in this country"
everything is decided by the elite and there's no need to worry about hoi
polloi; in their view, the people would swallow any old rubbish or lies like it
was manna from heaven. That is why the need for "social policies," "sharing" and
the like was brushed aside and rejected with a smirk.

So where was big business all this time? Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the
liberal rulers. We were accomplices in their misdeeds and lies.

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2004/04/01/006.html

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2004/03/31/006.html



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