Posted on 07/21/2003 9:43:16 PM PDT by DPB101
In the quiet of the Russian summer, a noisy political brawl is rewriting the rules of Russian politics.
During the past two weeks, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man and one of its most powerful, has watched as federal prosecutors hit his oil company and his allies with a flurry of criminal charges, including theft of state property, tax evasion and even murder. In a piece of Russian-style police theatrics, masked officers toting automatic weapons raided his office archives.
The investigations have confounded even the most seasoned Russia experts. President Vladimir V. Putin, a former K.G.B. spy, has established credentials as a market reformer. The economy, under his leadership, is stronger than it has been in half a century.
He had, at least in part, dispelled fears that his old K.G.B. ways would dominate his management of the country. Why, they ask, would Mr. Putin risk destroying his considerable achievements over a political wrangle? Perhaps more important, were early fears about his K.G.B. background justified?
"People's theory about Mr. Putin has been challenged by this," said Michael McFaul, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "They're saying: `Hey, maybe we don't quite have him pegged yet. Maybe we don't really understand what is going on here.' "
Mr. Khodorkovsky, in his brand-new 20-story corporate headquarters, has his own theory. The attacks, in his opinion, were engineered by a small group of aggressive bureaucrats with security service backgrounds in Mr. Putin's entourage.
"What we are seeing is the most repressive and aggressive part of the bureaucracy in its dying throes," Mr. Khodorkovsky said in an interview. "We got over communism in 1996. Now the last sickness is the absolute power of the bureaucratic system."
Many liberal supporters of Mr. Putin agree. Yulia Latynina, a novelist and political columnist, talks of a creeping coup of former K.G.B. officials who oppose market liberals in the government and who may be trying to seize power in the Kremlin.
"It's a historic event," Ms. Latynina said. "Our president has to choose. Either it's a couple of greedy stealing officials who happen to be his personal friends, or the market."
Many politicians say that Mr. Khodorkovsky's real sin, in the eyes of the Kremlin, was political. Russia will hold parliamentary elections in December, and the tycoon and his allies had been pouring millions of dollars into parties opposed to the Kremlin. Mr. Putin himself is running for re-election next March, and while no one believes he could lose, Mr. Khodorkovsky's donations could have upset Mr. Putin's dominance in Parliament.
"Putin wants to show Khodorkovsky who is in charge," said Boris E. Nemtsov, leader of the Union of Right Forces, a political party. "He wants the oligarchs to be afraid."
Mr. Khodorkovsky, for his part, said that he was simply being public about what all Russian business groups were doing in private and that Mr. Putin had always been aware of those actions. Even so, Mr. Khodorkovsky's move into politics violated an implicit agreement between Mr. Putin and tycoons who grew rich from the lawless privatization of the 1990's, a senior Kremlin official said. The president agreed not to inquire into the origins of business fortunes on the condition that those oligarchs would stay out of politics.
Two who made their money in the media, Vladimir A. Gusinsky and Boris A. Berezovsky, refused to play along, and both now live abroad. In the fight, Mr. Putin muzzled free news organizations. But there was little sympathy in Russia for the two, who had used their television stations to promote their commercial interests.
Since the July 2 arrest of Mr. Khodorkovsky's close business associate, Platon Lebedev, on charges of fraud, the authorities have begun seven investigations into people or companies affiliated with Mr. Khodorkovsky. That has sliced $7 billion off the value of his oil company, Yukos.
The 14 top oligarchs, most of whom are not ethnic Russians, are funding Gennady Zyuganov--the leader of the Communist Party. They are opposed to Putin for another reasons--Putin slapped a "super-profit" tax on them and is going after them criminally for what they did in the 1990s. The oligarchs are despised by most Russians.
"What we are seeing is the most repressive and aggressive part of the bureaucracy in its dying throes," Mr. Khodorkovsky said in an interview. "We got over communism in 1996. Now the last sickness is the absolute power of the bureaucratic system."Sabrina Tavernise is either lying or stupid. Khodorkovsky, Abramovitch, Berezovksy, Chernoy, Gusinsky, Smolensky and Zuganov are supporting Communists, not fighting the old system.
I vote for both... she seems to have an unhealthy admiration for communism.
******
Racy New Russia Forgets The "Women's Rights" Of The Communist Era
In an apparent effort to tart up its front section, the Times put a story in its International section whose subject wouldn't have been out of place in a tabloid: A profile of the racy Russian pop duo TATU.
Yulia Volkova and Elena Katina are two 18-year-old girls who dress up in schoolgirl outfits and mimic lesbianism in their videos and on stage. Their act has caused controversy in Britain, where they've hit the top of the pop charts.
Sabrina Tavernise's piece from Moscow uses the TATU titillation to claim a "cultural divide between Russia and the United States" on issues of sex-and to express a yearning for the security of the old Soviet Union.
To Tavernise, it seems the Iron Curtain of Soviet Communism was nothing more than a constricting blanket to be tossed off a bed, good for sexual freedom and perversion but disastrous for people's pocketbooks. "The group is the product of the sexual free-for-all that ensued after the fall of the Soviet Union. After the strait-laced Soviet state collapsed in 1991, sex exploded onto city streets, television shows and advertisements," she writes. "But the new freedoms that brought openness in sexual relations also carried economic woes. The Soviet economy collapsed and a raw, new capitalism emerged, plunging millions of Russians into poverty. In the scramble to survive, prostitution and human trafficking jumped, as did production of child pornography."
The phrase "strait-laced Soviet state" seems to praise by faint damn the Soviet dictatorship, and one can hardly credit the idea that "poverty' emerged in Russia only after the Communist regime of bread lines and rationing had collapsed.
Tavernise also includes this ahistorical howler: "Most Russians see the West as sexually repressed. During President Bill Clinton's impeachment, Russians admired his manliness instead of judging his morals. In Russia, feminism is a dirty word, despite the Soviet era's emphasis on women's rights."
Women's rights? Tavernise seems to forget that under Soviet Communism, neither men nor women had any rights at all.
http://www.timeswatch.org/articles/2003/0304.asp
LOL...good catch! yeah...women could drive tractors in the Soviet Union. They also were also property of the state. And then there was that little matter of the Red Army engaging in mass rape at the end of WWII..
Good Christian Science Monitor article on the situtation in Russia :
Trouble brews between the Kremlin and the oligarchs
Putin told them the oligarchs he would overlook their theft of 70% of the wealth of the country if they stayed out of politics and let Russians decide their own fate. Gusinsky ,Goldovsky , Berezovsky and others didn't pay attention and paid the price. Khodorkovsky, in turn, learned nothing from their fate.
Yes, Gore, Clinton and Harvard were in on the looting of Russia. Investigations are continuing. If anyone is ever brought to justice, I'll be surprised. These crooks were good.
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