By Matt Taibbi
I don’t want people to think I’m busting on Joe Nocera of the New York Times – that’s not my intention at all – but I feel like I have to say something about his column, "Russian Justice." It’s yet another in a long line of pieces written by Western reporters criticizing the Putin administration for throwing "businessman" Mikhail Khodorkovsky in jail on trumped-up charges as part of an ongoing power play.
These Western critics are absolutely right to jump down Putin’s throat for using prisons and cops (to say nothing of assassinations) as weapons to deal with unwelcome political challenges. Putin has behaved like a tinpot dictator and this over-the-top thuggery should definitely be condemned.
But I’m getting tired of reading about how Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former chief of the oil company Yukos and the bank, Menatep, is some kind of martyr to free capitalism. Western reporters always introduce Khodorkovsky by mentioning his "murky" activities in the mid-nineties, activities that may have been legally questionable, but were "emblematic of the times" and "part of the Wild West atmopshere of the Yeltsin era." This has become a self-justifying cliche and I think those American reporters who didn’t live there don’t really understand what they’re saying when they write these things.
Here’s how Nocera put it:
The founder of Yukos, the country’s best-run oil producer, Khodorkovsky undoubtedly played fast and loose in building the company in the early 1990s.
The plutocrats had no problem with that. But then Khodorkovsky did two things that made him intolerable. He began transforming Yukos into a legitimate company that played by the rules of Western capitalism.
On the part about transforming Yukos into a legitimate company … I have no comment on that, at least not today. But Nocera, in describing how Khodorkovsky played "fast and loose" in building Yukos, leaves out one important detail: he stole the fucking company!
Keep reading here: Okay, Enough: Stop Feeling Sorry for Misha Khodorkovsky | Rolling Stone Politics | Taibblog | Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy.
