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Yuriy Alekseyevich, I cannot help but ask
about what you said before the start of this interview
that for the past year you've had a feeling
of prestorm atmosphere in society…
First you begin to reason in a primitive way.
A financial meltdown began.
It began abroad and began in our country
it began from mortgages,
with all those empty bubbles.
The financial meltdown in our country and abroad as well
turned into a fairly substantial economic crisis,
when production and sales fall.
That entails social tension
and unemployment.
In our country, they don't know how to deal with it
and are unprepared to do so,
because our economy is not diversified,
because in those fat years,
when oil prices were enormous,
when we were creating enormous gold and currency reserves,
not a step was made
to begin developing real economy.
We've missed that train,
and I think that we will never catch up,
because all these vain attempts
even in the sphere that is close to me,
aircraft building,
we will never be what we used to be,
for a number of reasons.
And no superjets will save us,
all the more so since there is very little of our own there.
It's like foreign cars assembled in Leningradskaya Oblast
we only assemble them,
but we cannot manufacture parts, the principal elements.
Will there be a second wave of the financial crisis?..
The economic one has already passed,
it is going on, a downswing,
and the social one is ripening.
The question is how,
in what forms it will be resolved.
I think that the Yukos case is in general a special point.
Special in the sense that,
persecution of individually selected scientists
was aimed to show the especially freedom-loving technical intellectuals
that one may be put away for anything at all
in the same manner Mr. Putin decided to show
the commanders of the economy
in the first place, of course, the richest economy,
that of raw materials,
because aluminum is also a raw material
and all the rest, and pipes as well.
He chose Mikhail Khodorkovsky as his target
for his free statements
in the presence of this young man
whose last name is Putin
and who did not like, in my opinion, such a feeling
a smart, independent man
who knows what he says
and knows what he does
You have talked about correspondence.
When did it begin?
How and how long ago did you get acquainted with Mikhail Khodorkovsky?
I am not acquainted with him.
I went to the trial.
I stood there when they were led out by the stairs
with guards armed with automatics in front and behind them,
little short of a tank taking the stairs.
They made us stand here.
There were people who go there regularly
and they knew where to stand,
on what stair, and they told me to stand here
So- And our eyes met.
He must have seen me on television,
and I have also seen his pictures
so we kind of winked to each other.
Later, when I sat there on a bench
next to a young correspondent
and when I saw that what was happening
was indeed some damned nonsense,
I pushed that young reporter and ask him,
"Can we laugh here?"
"They'll take you out," he said.
And then once again
we had body-language contact with Mikhail Khodorkovsky
And it was he who wrote a letter.
He began with thanks for my coming to the trial and so forth.
I write in this letter that I will be doing that
in the future as well.
And then I add some of my thoughts about the trial,
and he knows that I have that spying scientists case,
and he wished us success in that hopeless case.
That's what the letter was about.
I give my regards to the parents of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in the letter.
I have seen them once and heard them,
at the Sakharov Foundation - there was such a hearing,
maybe you were there too,
and I am a member of the board at the Foundation from its inception.
And both his dad and his mom were there.
And I admired his dad speaking, a remarkable person,
he reminded me of my father some,
but my father also was like an old accountant,
wise and all-knowing,
as we say, an accountant with pre-Revolutionary work experience.
And his mom reminded me of my mom,
poignant in thought and speech.
They are an absolutely wonderful family.
Those prosecutors and the judge,
they go back home in the evening.
Everyone understands everything.
How does it happen?
At what level does this conscience corrosion occur?
You know, in Russia, it's nothing new,
it's very easy.
We have a large, so to say,
genetic hole,
created in Stalin's times
peeling off the most independent people,
capable of organizing and doing something on their own.
As a result, we have that paternalistic habit
it may be the most rotten paternalism,
which spreads you thin against the wall,
but it gives you a piece of bread
and a bottle of liquor and to hell with it all.
Regrettably, such a genetic selection,
conducted during the 20th century,
negatively affects our prospects.
It is my opinion that the prospects of our country
as a country in the sense in which we understand it
are simply nonexistent.
to pieces or how its pieces will be rearranged.
But it is natural that something of that kind is in the offing.
The reasons- Let's take the Russian Far East.
People are abandoning it.
But those who stay there,
they live independently from the federal center.
And that is happening not only in the Far East.
In spite of the appointment of governors,
the controllability of the regions has fallen,
because those governors, having been appointed,
come there where there has been formed their own local elite
and ties - criminal, noncriminal,
all kinds of family ties, etc.
And he immediately becomes dependent on them
and understands
that he needs to fit in with them
then there will be an appearance of decency
and then the president will not remove him
to appoint someone else.
Therefore, he holds tight to it.
How does one explain to people what must happen for people to understand
that the list does not include people's interests?
I think normal people,
and there are quite a few of them,
I think that the situation is understood correctly,
even though they may differ in their political orientation,
at last 15 percent in our country.
That is not at all little for a country of 140 million.
That's 20 million.