Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Alexei Pushkov, Chairman of the State Duma Committee for International Affairs
I think it indicates a serious self-assurance of the Russian authorities.
And it seems to me the factor of the Olympics, which is often connected with the release of Khodorkovsky, is not a key, if it was considered at all.
First of all, a human element played a big role in the release.
Khodorkovsky requested the authorities of Russia to grant him pardon and explained the reasons for this.
I think this was important. There were no such requests before.
Secondly, I think that Khodorkovskys release is an important step for one person, but, politically speaking, I dont think it changes anything seriously.
We cannot say that Khodorkovsky will deal with politics now or head the opposition movement in Russia and so on.
He doesn't show any intention of doing so.
It seems to me that he has decided to play the role of a public figure, a moral authority.
And this is a result of his long imprisonment. It seems he thought a lot during these years.
It was reflected in his letters, in his interviews and even in his last press conference in Berlin.
To be a moral authority one should travel a significant path, because any comparison with Solzhenitsyn is poor.
Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to prison not due to business or operations in question.
He was sentenced to prison because the content of his letters was found out; he suffered for his ideas.
Khodorkovsky has never been a prisoner of conscience. Obviously, some Western circles want to call him a prisoner of conscience.
To be a moral authority, he should estimate the period which made him a billionaire.
I mean the 1990s, when fortunes were scraped up in 2-3 years by difficult, ambiguous, shady and even criminal means;
when the state took part in distribution of state property to certain people through absolutely non-transparent schemes, absolutely groundless parameters;
when the so-called loans-for-shares auctions took place, which were a way of privatization of national assets by our major oligarchy groups without compensation to the country.
If Khodorkovsky gives moral and ethical appraisal to the period of establishing the criminal bandit capitalism in Russia, then probably he could become a moral authority.
The Rights and the Lefts came to one conclusion - that it was the worst privatization, i.e. plundering of the national assets.
But a moral authority who was raised by the epoch, who developed on the basis of the epoch, who achieved success in the epoch and who was an embodiment of the epoch, should break up with the heritage.
He should define his position toward the heritage.