Khodorkovsky's mea culpa

["Chris Doss" <nomorebounces@xxxxxxx>]

He's writing under duress, and it might not even be him at all, but even so... In two parts.

The Indisputable Crisis of Russian Liberalism

By Mikhail Khodorkovsky

(snip)

I do not mean to say that Anatoly Chubais, Yegor Gaidar et al. set themselves the objective of deceiving the country. Many liberals of the first "Yeltsin wave" sincerely believed in the historical rightness of liberalism and the need for a "liberal revolution" in a tired country which had hardly known the benefits of freedom. However, having suddenly got their hands on power, the liberals were too superficial -- if not downright frivolous -- in their attitude towards the revolution. They only thought about the 10 percent of the population that were prepared for the sweeping changes which came with the end of state paternalism, while they forgot about the other 90 percent. And more often than not, they resorted to deception to gloss over their tragic policy failures.

They cheated 90 percent of the population with their lavish promises that each privatization voucher would be worth two Volga cars. Certainly, an entrepreneurial person with access to closed information and the necessary skills to analyze such information could figure out how to make the equivalent of 10 Volgas using his privatization voucher. But the promise was made to everybody.

They turned a blind eye to social realities when they conducted sweeping privatization, ignoring the negative consequences and disingenuously claiming the process was painless, open and fair. We know full well what ordinary people now think of mass privatization.

They did not stop to consider the catastrophic consequences of decimating people's Sberbank deposits, even though it would have been perfectly simple to resolve the problem through state bonds, which could have been redeemed through a capital gains tax (or using stakes in the country's top privatized companies). The imperious liberals could not spare a minute of their precious time, and anyway they did not want to overtax their gray matter.

In the 1990s, no one took upon themselves to reform education, healthcare, the housing sector; nor did anyone get around to addressing the issue of targeted support for the poorer sections of society. Yet these were and remain critical issues for the vast majority of our fellow citizens.

Russian liberals ignored social stability, the only basis for any long-term and wide-reaching set of reforms. A huge gulf separated them from the people -- a gulf which they tried to fill with rosy liberal notions about the state of things, and manipulative PR. Indeed, it was in the 1990s that the myth was born of the omnipotence of certain PR specialists, who were purportedly able to compensate for the absence of real policies in this or that area.

The 1995-96 election season amply demonstrated that the Russian people had rejected their liberal rulers. As one of the major sponsors of Yeltsin's 1996 re-election campaign, I know just what a gargantuan effort it took to make the Russian people "vote with their heart."

What were the country's liberal top managers thinking when they insisted that there was no alternative to the 1998 default? There was an alternative: devaluation of the ruble. Moreover, in February or even June 1998, it would have been possible to get away with devaluing from five rubles to 10-12 rubles to the dollar. I, along with many of my colleagues, supported such a plan for averting the impending financial crisis, but despite the considerable influence we had at the time we were unable to get our point across -- and therefore must share moral responsibility with the irresponsible incompetents then in power for the default.

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.

Well, Judgment Day finally came: In the December parliamentary elections, the Russian people bid a firm and tearless farewell to the official leaders of the country's liberal parties.

This reflected general disgust at the gaping gulf between the imperious liberals and the rest of the country.

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

We never entertained any illusions about the authorities, of course, but neither did we oppose them, not wanting to jeopardize our own piece of the pie. It is laughable to hear propagandists call us "oligarchs." An oligarchy is a small group of people who genuinely hold power. We, however, were always dependent on some mighty bureaucrat in his ultra-liberal thousand-dollar suit. And our collective visits to Yeltsin were a complete sham: We were being trotted out as the main culprits responsible for the country's woes, although we did not immediately understand this.


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

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