Abstract

The Struggle for Russia

The author comments on the economic and political implications for Russia of the arrest last month of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the principal owner of Russia's biggest oil company, Yukos, and the richest of the country's seventeen state-anointed billionaire oligarchs, on charges of fraud and tax evasion. Democracy in Russia has been failing ever since Yeltsin made oligarchical privatization possible by destroying an elected parliament in 1993, and neither side is interested in truly reviving it. Privatization--or "piratization" as it is often called in Russia--did not take place in an economic or social vacuum. It was accompanied in the 1990s by the worst economic depression of modern times and the impoverishment of a great many Russians, probably the majority of them. In the process, it created the oligarchical economic system that exists today. Various motives are behind the Khodorkovsky affair, but none would matter if that system had not failed to alleviate Russia's most profound problems. From the vast provinces beyond "booming" Moscow, one hears persistent reports that "Russia is dying." That ongoing human tragedy is what is mainly missing from the US media story, where poverty and the plight of most Russians are hardly ever mentioned. Even if some accounts of Russia's crisis are overstated, the only solution is a new economic course that uses the oligarchs' enormous profits from the country's natural resources to rescue and develop the rest of the nation, though not even its advocates agree on how to do it. There is the hope, realistic or not, that Putin is finally turning against his creators and preparing to become, as even a KGB general remarked privately, "Vladimir the Savior.".