Letters to the Editor
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WOw.. brilliantly written!
What a great story to write about.. so many social and economical contexts involved. You had me with "Stolichnaya Elit, the finest potato juice known to man..." Thanks for a beautifully written account.
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Grrrr... We're better than them...
But they have more money.
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The Khodorkovsky PR machine gets a free ride at Salon I see
The darker side of Russia's new dawn has been well covered in the West, with reports of deep corruption, crackdowns on the free media, assassination attempts on the wealthy, and the prosecution of powerful men like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the multibillionaire whose political ideas apparently didn't sit well with the Kremlin, and who is now languishing in a Siberian labor camp.
Poor Khodorkovsky, the political victim. NOT.
I think it's quite fascinating that so many of the business murders, for want of a better word, of the late nineties and early millenium, have been linked to the owners of Yukos: the imprisoned Khodorkosky and his at-large partner Nevzlin.
For example, the Gorins, a couple who worked for Yukos -- according to their children, Yukos head of security Alexei Pichugin showed up one day, beat them up and locked them in a closet. The children heard their parents come home and that's the last they ever heard from their parents.
Supposedly the Gorins wanted out of a business partnership where they hired hit men to work for Puchugin. Two of these hit men allegedly hired by the Gorins were caught, giving Yukos a motive for wanting the Gorins dead.
The mayor of Nefteyugansk had the audacity to present Yukos with a tax bill. He's dead and Puchugin is serving time for his murder.
Valentina Korneeva quit her high level job at Yukos to take a job with the Moscow city government. She's dead now. Pichugin has confessed to killing her to keep her from revealing comprising information about Yukos to the government.
All of this is easily retrievable from Google.
I don't have much respect for Clare Foges' skills as a journalist or ethics as a human being if she's still portraying Khodorkovsky as some kind of political prisoner.
Think of the children of the Gorins. Think of the husband of Valentina Korneeva. Think of the widow of the mayor of Nefteyugansk.
This is not politics. Yukos left a lot of dead bodies behind in their rise to power and the men who did that are not in any way shape or form victims.
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I mean really Clare Foges
How many political prisoners do we see in the world whose former heads of security are serving time in prison for murdering the business obstacles of their company?
It's really outrageous what a free ride Khodorkovsky is getting in America.
A political leader, hah. He only announced his intentions in politics after he found out it might get him out of prison.
Murdering your ex-employees to protect your company secrets is illegal even in America.
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I sure hope Obama vetts his VP choice
better than American journalists have been able to vett Khodorkovsky.
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The part that makes me want to gag the most
The article is about how filthy rich these people are.
The problem is, the price of oil hasn't been obscenely high for as long as many of these people have been obscenely rich. So how did they all get so rich so fast?
Isn't it possible that many of them got so filthy rich by breaking the law? For example, by committing fraud and tax evasion -- the actual crimes for which Khodorkovsky was convicted?
And don't you think some of them might think of trying to protect such obscene wealth from the government by ordering the murder of employees who had compromising knowledge of the company -- the crimes to which Khodorkovsky's former head of security has confessed and is now serving time in prison?
In the middle of all this obscene wealth, somehow Khodorkovsky comes out as the victimized angel, the penniless dissident whose only crime was to say some unkind words about Putin.
His PR people have really earned their pay!
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WTF?
"a glorious release of pent up energy", what a steaming heap. When I think of such a statement, it's not about a bunch of tasteless and gaudy rich people who I might speculate have a less than even chance of getting to that point in a semi-respectable/legal fashion. What was this writer smoking?
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Inane
1: the quality or state of being inane: as a: lack of substance : emptiness b: vapid, pointless, or fatuous character : shallowness
Dear Editors,
Please, please no more Clare. The giant sucking-up sound is ringing in my ears and has given me the headache.
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Hmm...
Ahh, another modern-day Custine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Custine). It's a bit uncanny how lauding unbridled human appetites while making them seem somehow underdeveloped always makes for a colorful, compelling story. I usually read Salon because there is a bit more subtlety and background research to the cultural commentary. Is it coincidental that the Russian soul, "dusha" is warped in this article into the Chinese-sounding "dashu"? Poor Russians, eternally bombarded by pre-Saidian east-west essentialists from within and without. If only someone would let them off the hook for once, maybe they would catch up with us civilized, boring folks.
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The color of money
When the Nigerians were flush with cash (from oil and corruption) between 1975 and say 1990 there was much of the same gnashing of teeth about their gaudy, arriviste ways in London. Hushed tones and raised eyebrows about new money from supposedly brash and backward people were par for the course. The thing is that everyone was in on the act; everyone was quite happy to take the money that was splashed around, whether it was incidental tips or the fruits of shopping expeditions in Harrods. Lucky for some I suppose.
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Letter from St. Petersburg
Russian culture embraces exuberance and beauty, and it IS pretty to watch the peacocks in all of their plumage, but there is nothing at all to celebrate about the 'let them eat cake' attitude of Russia's ultra-wealthy. They leave the country now not because they are seeking liberty, or even items that cannot be purchased (there is nothing that cannot be purchased in Moscow today). Rather, they leave because there is too much here that reminds them of all of the systemic and social problems that need fixing. The idea that with privilege comes responsibity has not taken hold among Russia's wealthy class. It will take time for this to happen, and in the mean time, there should be a concerted effort by their foreign peers (sneers?) in London, Paris and Courchevel to demonstrate that philanthropy at home can give the most elite an even higher status.