Free Republic

Americans are becoming only too aware of the financial tricks and deceit in which some of the nation's largest and most respected corporations engaged during the Clinton administration to pump up stock prices with fraudulently inflated profits. When the huge bubble no longer could be sustained the men and women at the top would bail out of their stock and pocket millions, leaving pensioners and other investors holding an empty bag. To market insiders these are known as "pump and dumps." While federal investigators are looking into the corporate malfeasance at Enron, WorldCom, Qwest Communications, AOL Time Warner and...

<p>LONDON — Three years after fleeing Russian President Vladimir Putin's attack on him and his businesses in Moscow, Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky loiters in his manicured Surrey garden, watching history apparently repeat itself in Russia.</p> <p>In the past month, his fellow oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of Yukos — Russia's largest oil company — became a target of Mr. Putin's conflict with the oligarchs. In what is widely seen as an attempt to curb their political influence, Mr. Khodorkovsky's deputy was arrested and Yukos' offices were raided by masked police. Mr. Khodorkovsky's response was to announce that he will steer clear of politics until 2007.</p>

The Kremlin-Yukos conflict, almost a month old now, has shaken the conventional wisdom many had come to accept about the Vladimir Putin presidency. In a nutshell, the standard interpretation before this happened was the following: Putin's 2000 agreement with the oligarchs called for strengthening the state without big business getting overly involved in politics. In turn, the state would not meddle too much in the affairs of the business empires - basically, in the Russian economy. Of course, there are many nuances, but, essentially, the Yukos fracas has put this 'social contract,' as it were, into question. Eventually, most likely...

KIROVSK, Murmanskaya Oblast - The 30,000 inhabitants of this Arctic town in the middle of the vast Kola Peninsula pride themselves on being happy and hospitable. There are reasons for this: For an industrial town, the multicolored buildings look refreshingly pristine and the view is panoramic, especially this time of year, when the sun always hangs in the sky, except for an occasional dip behind the barren and breathtaking Khibiny mountains. But life hasn't always been so idyllic. Like hundreds of other outcroppings in Stalin's gulag system, Kirovsk was designed as a labor camp of death and detainment. It is...

If you want to predict the future of any conflict, find out who is sponsoring it. Terrorism, revolutions and civil wars require large investments. To become a real threat, popular discontent must be used by members of the social elite. Vladimir Lenin once said that for his cause he could take money from Satan himself. Satan was Germany, with whom Lenin concluded a deal: In exchange for the sponsoring of the Bolshevik revolution, he promised, in case of victory, to sign with Germany a separate peace agreement, ceding to it a huge part of Russian territory and betraying Russia's allies...