Kommersant: Mikhail Khodorkovsky Writes Program 2020

Prisoner YaG 14/10, former owner of YUKOS Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has shown that he intends to continue his political activity in prison. He has given Kommersant an article outlining a concept for the modernization of Russia. “The left turn,” he says, entails combining democratic methods of government with state paternalism.
Some of the theses of Khodorkovsky’s program and the characterization of the political situation in Russia were also included in an interview published yesterday in the French Politique Internationale. Khodorkovsky severely criticizes the “Putin system” in which “absolutely everything, from the railroad police to the days off in the prisons, depends on the tastes, moods and whims of one man.” Khodorkovsky is no less decisively critical of the opposition, which, in his opinion, is in a deep crisis. “The causes of this crisis are that today the opposition parties are headed not by statesmen but by people whom I would call businessmen from politics,” he said. They is not striving for power but only to “trade political claims” for the “goodwill of the Kremlin.”

The real opposition, Khodorkovsky says, will first form “on the left flank.” But only a coalition is capable to taking over per from the present authorities, headed by politicians, “liberals in the economic plan and socially left.” They will meet the hopes of the active part of Russian society. “Those hopes are expressed simultaneously in the desire for more social justice and a real market economy,” the former oligarch explained.

In the article by Khodorkovsky published today in Kommersant, Khodorkovsky outlines his plans for the modernization of Russia by 2020 and the legitimization of the privatization of property in the 1990s.

by Andrey Kochetov
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LINK TO Mikhail Khodorkovsky's article on the MBKh Society Site

Kommersant 11.11.2005