Which Side Are You On?

Karl Naylor writes:

Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a villain whose Yukos oil corporation was built on force, fraud and contract killings. Yet because he has rebranded himself as a designer revolutionary, opinion in the West tends to accept him as some kind of martyr in Putin's supposedly "Neo- Soviet" regime.

Time and time again, the same repetitive propaganda tropes are recycled. A despotism in different period clothes versus the enlightened within the regime who rebel against it through some spiritual convertion. Look at the assertion here by the writer Boris Akunin in The Guardian today, "Over the next few months, we exchanged letters. I asked questions, the prisoner of Siberia replied. And gradually I became aware that my curiosity for my subject was changing, at first into a deep sympathy, and latterly into a growing admiration for the sheer force of personality of this individual. Yes, Khodorkovsky has been very unlucky in his fate, but we, his compatriots, have been unbelievably lucky: the party of human dignity is today embodied by an individual who conducts himself in a model fashion and does not bend or break under pressure. I do not rule out even that the pitiless machine of oppression will break itself on his resolve."

Akunin's banal homily and distortion of history to portray this vulgar chiselling little crook as some kind of idealist is utterly unconvincing propaganda. It's absurd to portray Khodorkovsky as some successor to the Decembrists of 1825 who tried to challenge the Tsar and who had honourable intentions. For a start, the Decembrists were aristocrats who had developed a deep love of Russia through seeing the awakening of the Russian people during the struggle to remove Napoleon and the epic events of 1812. Loyalty to nation and the narod motivated them. As it did the narod who opposed Napoleon's self interested propaganda of "liberation". The motley array of fraudsters who back Khodorkovsky have total contempt for ordinary Russians, none of whom get a mention in this pseudo-literary puff piece. Akunin simply does not care about them, the way oligarchs such as Khodorkovsky stripped the country and enriched themselves after 1990.

"...what is striking is that the aristocrats, the party of human dignity in today's Russia, are represented not by a Solzhenitsyn or a Mandela but by a former billionaire. Although this is perhaps no more striking than the fact that his predecessor as the figurehead of the aristocratic movement was the father of the atomic bomb and a man who was three times named a Hero of Socialist Labour, Andrei Sakharov. History just loves paradoxes."

History might love paradoxes but not those simply invented purely in the heads of mendacious propagandists based on false parallels. Sakharov was a brave man who had never cheated or swindled people as Khodorkovsky had. Khodorkovsky used the freedom after 1991 to distort and pervert it. If historians in the future will need to explain a paradox it is why freedom was distorted to mean the freedom of powerful oligarchs to defraud the public interest. That is, why so many colluded in generating a propaganda that actually set back the possibility of Russian people supporting liberal and democratic reform as opposed to doctrinaire neoliberal economic "shock therapy" that has catastrophic consequences in the 1990s.

For as Anatol Lieven has argued, the sheer social distance of supposed Russian liberals from the Russian people, as well as their contempt and suspicion of them, is one of the main reasons why Russian high politics remains a contest between different oligarchical factions. A reason why "Democracy Promotion" as it exists is fake and blatantly partisan in favour of "our oligarchs". In that struggle the West favours those that will weaken the Russian state the better to get control of the oil gas and other assets, one reason Putin is the target of so much hatred by those like Edward Lucas, without understanding-or caring-about how hated these people are. And their obvious and documented criminality. The nature of Khodorkovsky's game was shown in a short excerpt from the interview Debtor Nation: The Hijacking of America’s Economy, which the economist Dr. Michael Hudson gave ACRES USA in January 2008:

ACRES: And this is what brought on the Mexican standoff, the standoff between Putin and that oligarch ...
HUDSON: Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
ACRES: Right, he imprisoned him. Was that a sort of running up the flag to tell the rest of them what was going to happen?
HUDSON: Khodorkovsky not only had been the most notorious tax evader in Russia, but having privatized Russian oil, he was then about to turn around and sell his company to Exxon so that he could take the money out of the country in much the same way that Berezovsky and other Russian oligarchs had done.

This would have essentially sold out Russia’s natural resources to its major Cold War enemy, the United States. Russia would have been economically destroyed had Khodorkovsky gone through with it. Khodorkovsky also announced that he was going to run for president and be the main funder of the right-wing Pinochetista party there. It actually was called “The Party of Right Forces.” So of course Putin threw him in jail, quite rightly.

Now, Putin-haters and Kremlin-baiters, with your beloved National Bolsheviks fighting on the streets of Moscow against your beloved North Caucasian Islamist separatists, for which side are you cheering, and why?