<DIV>Hopefully this email account will prove more viable.</DIV> <DIV> 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 The stoic fighters for liberalism, who were prepared to die for their ideals, were superseded by effete bohemians, who did not even attempt to conceal their indifference towards the fate of ordinary people, the silent masses.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. <A target=_blank href="http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2004/04/01/006.html">http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2004/04/01/006.html</A> <A target=_blank href="http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2004/03/31/006.html">http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2004/03/31/006.html</A> </DIV><hr size=1>Do you Yahoo!? <a href="http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=23609/*http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/static/index2.html">Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway</a> - Enter today