A Pyrrhic Victory

Images of last week: at the Khodorkovsky-Lebedev trial in the Moscow Meschanski Court the prosecutor is reading the 400-volume case with deliberate slowness. The defendants’ countenance demonstrates that for them, the trial is a farce. One is working his way through crossword puzzles, the other one is reading a book by Richard Pipes, a famous American historian of Russia (bravo, Mikhail, great choice! I wonder if Prosecutor Ustinov has read Pipes’ book; I won’t even mention senior officials).

So what, has everything been predetermined already?

It looks like Yukos’ fate actually has. Last Thursday, the company’s top managers announced that if the state auctions off the frozen Yuganskneftegaz stock (Yuganskneftegaz is the company’s chief industrial asset), a Yukos bankruptcy is inevitable.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in turn, has published a statement that in this situation, Yukos must be headed by a state representative. The former head of the oil company is desperate to keep it alive. Obviously, no longer for himself or his partners: politically, that is not an option. Most likely, he just feels sorry for all his work, for his brainchild, a still operational oil company with average monthly revenues of $1.8 billion. Will the Kremlin react to this?

I’ll be amazed if it does.

One very well informed politician has said to me, on condition of confidentiality: “There must be nothing left of Yukos, not even a name; that’s the order from the very top.”

The defense at the Khodorkovsky-Lebedev trial can complain all it likes that the prosecutor is taking so much time to read the volumes of the case, unembarrassed to quote the same document several times, drawing out the trial. He’s got nowhere to hurry. Until the Yukos pogrom is over, until there is no doubt that Khodorkovsky will never get his company back, it doesn’t look like he’ll be in any hurry.

Top Yukos managers can get as frustrated as they like that they’ve sent eleven letters to various government institutions, only to get no reply. They can send hundred of letters if they like. They can lament the fact that according to the law, Yukos’ industrial assets such as Yuganskneftegaz have to be sold last. They can say that this asset costs many times more than the amount the state wants to sell it for, and its established oil resources are worth as much as $30 billion.

It’s all in vain, because the government’s motives are not in a rational economical plane.

It’s about politics. Carthage must be destroyed. If the enemy does not surrender, he must be destroyed. And sometimes it’s about plain revenge.

The memories of 1917 come back.

The Bolsheviks stripped landowners and capitalists of their property (assets, we would say today). There can be different attitudes towards this, but it’s a historical fact. It’s just that there were different ways to handle the goods that were taken away. Sometimes they were taken care of rather pragmatically. The confiscated estates were turned into resorts for the victorious proletariat, or into dachas for the leaders. Most often, however, they were burned to the ground, moronically, vengefully.

Some, for instance, seized merchant Ryabushinsky’s famous Moscow villa and gave it as a residence to a great proletarian writer, and when he died, turned it into a Gorky museum. As a result, thank God, at least the building was preserved, a masterpiece of Russian modernism with unique Schechtel interiors.

Others gave the requisitioned manors to assorted riffraff. That is what happened to merchant Sergey Schukin’s house in Moscow, where he had gathered a unique collection of European paintings, including Van Gogh, Cezanne, Renoir, Picasso, and Matisse.

Eyewitnesses say that in Schukin’s manor, eventually handed over to the Defense Ministry, the former Claude Monet room housed a “Lenin Room” with fiberboard walls in the late 70s. Why was all of this done? There is no answer.

Why, for instance, was prominent liberal historian Nikolay Romanov shot in 1919, despite Gorky’s begging for mercy on his behalf? For being a Romanov, a Great Prince and the grandson of Nicholas II. Lenin had replied to Gorky: “The revolution needs no historians.” Now we need no outstanding businessmen, who are born no less often, by the way, than outstanding historians or writers.

All of this reminds me of the end of the Prague Spring as well. As Alexander Genis and Pyotr Vail have so appropriately noted, after Soviet troops occupied Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968, in the Soviet Union, “the sixties ended before their time and the nothingness years began: Tvardovsky’s ’New World’ was still being published, protest letters were still being signed, no one had started to leave Russia forever yet…But all of this was just inertia on the part of history, which had gained momentum and was lunging forward like a chicken with its head cut off.”

The Yukos pogrom will most likely start another “epoch of no time” in our history, sad as it may be. It might still have room for liberal and progressive media for a while, it might produce good books, movies, and performances, it will most likely be marked by relative prosperity. But it will be stuffy, apathetic, stagnant, full of corruption and emigration. This is the price the country will be forced to pay for yet another Pyrrhic victory.

HERE