Posted on 11/27/2010 12:37:38 PM PST by devere
I can recall October 2003. My last day as a free man. Several weeks after my arrest, I was informed that president Putin had decided: I was going to have to slurp gruel for 8 years. It was hard to believe that back then.
Seven years have gone by already since that day. Seven years quite a long stretch of time, and all the more so when youve spent it in jail. All of us have had time to reassess and rethink many things.
Judging by the prosecutors presentation: give them 14 years and spit on previous court decisions, over these years they have begun to fear me more, and to respect the law even less.
The first time around, they at least went through the effort of first repealing the judicial acts that stood in their way. Now theyll just leave them be; especially since they would need to repeal not two, but more than 60 decisions.
I do not want to return to the legal side of the case at this time. Everybody who wanted to understand something has long since understood everything. Nobody is seriously waiting for an admission of guilt from me. It is hardly likely that somebody today would believe me if I were to say that I really did steal all the oil produced by my company.
But neither does anybody believe that an acquittal in the YUKOS case is possible in a Moscow court.
Notwithstanding, I want to talk to you about hope. Hope the main thing in life. I remember the end of the 80s of the last century. I was 25 then. Our country was living on hope of freedom, hope that we would be able to achieve happiness for ourselves and for our children.
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What about all the other Russian looters like Roman A and other other crooks? Why didn’tr they go to jail? Still - I would take Putin over Obama ANY day.
“What about all the other Russian looters like Roman A and other other crooks? Why didntr they go to jail?”
They didn’t support democracy in Russia like Khodorkovsky.
“I would take Putin over Obama ANY day.”
They are both very dangerous, each in his own way.
Exactly. Putin is a pro-Russian fascist with nostalgia for the Soviet era. Obama is an anti-American fascist with hatred of the people he governs and a desire to turn them into slaves of the workers of the world. Both are poison; were he America, I would choose Putin over Obama, but I prefer that we have neither and go back to having freedom and a limited government.
“Fabian Constitutionalist” is a nice phrase.
>I would take Putin over Obama ANY day.
Dude, both Putin and Obama are ego-driven megalomaniacs hell-bent on destroying others. The difference is that Putin doesnt cry over 12 stitches after playing pick-up basketball.
I said I would take Putin over Obama in a second but Putin is an evil POS. He does like dogs but Hitler did too.
As you said - he is pro-Russian fascist who might improve some things in Russia as long as he controls it and gets his cut. I am not sure if he has kept evil scum like Soros out. Obama’s mission is to destroy America.
This fellow stuck around Russia and tried to make things better. He sadly is paying the price.
The other oligarchs (I had forgotten the term) - stole everything and split to London, Cyprus, Switzerland, Canada and some to the USA. I am amazed that Putin allows them to keep their holdings.
” that Putin doesnt cry over 12 stitches after playing pick-up basketball.”
Mainly because Putin is used to inflicting stitches and making other people cry.
They are both very dangerous, each in his own way.
At least Pooty is heterosexual. And not Muslim. In fact, he's not even as much of a commie as Bammi.
When they tell us that with the fruits of our labor, we cannot buy the products we want, whether it is medical procedures or butter, salt, light bulbs or flush toilets, we see that they intend to own our lives.
When we cannot save our after tax income in order to have a decent retirement and pass something on to our children without 55 percent of that going to fund the desires of politicians to buy votes from those who have nothing else to offer, we learn that they want to control our posterity and destroy the transmission of prosperity by parents. Only government, the parent of us all, can have that role.
When actual, indisputable rights are ignored, and new ones desired by the political class created, it seems to me they think they are saying that anything they desire is legal, and anything they disdain is forbidden, actual laws be damned.
We are not as far from Mr. Khodorkovsky's fate as many people think we are. Whether Khodorkovsky is a sympathetic character or a thug I don't know; but I know he is imprisoned in a system that doesn't depend on law to determine his fate. His fate is under the control of one man.
In Russia, there is not a lot of public sympathy for the oligarchy who looted the country’s wealth while the living standards of most Russians declined. And its taken Russia a long time to climb out of the dark years years of Yeltsin, when no hope seemed to be in sight. The only thing Russians associate with democracy is impoverishment, instability, powerlessness and decline. For the vast majority of them, a good life is more important than freedom. The fate of Khodorovsky is not really burning news in Russia today.
And there is no doubt Khodorovski is guilty.
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