Everyone knows that the physicist turned human rights crusader Andrei Sakharov was a dissident, but what about oligarch turned oppositionist Khodorkovsky?
The idea of a dissident with overseas bank accounts and an army of lawyers and publicists writing blogs and Twitter feeds on his behalf from safe quarters in London and Washington seems paradoxical.
However, they argue, in a country whose government has silenced and decimated all the traditional agents of dissent - journalists, academics, scientists - “open defiance… is left to a robber baron with a murky past, a billionaire dissident for a new era in a country that may have shed its Soviet skin but not its autocratic skeleton”.
As a neo-perestroika liberal whose respect for Sakharov has been matched by a disdain for Khodorkovsky, I must admit to being very uncomfortable with such a comparison. After all, one man was a feted scientist who threw away his status and comfort to fight for justice, while the other was a billionaire who made his money in shady ways and then fought for his own political power.
Refreshingly clear-eyed, Glasser and Baker acknowledge this:
Khodorkovsky was no Solzhenitsyn. He may have been headstrong, but what he cared about most was acquiring money and power…
By age 30, he was buying state assets through manipulated auctions. He acquired control of Yukos, then the country’s second-largest oil producer, for a paltry $309 million in a 1995 auction run, conveniently enough, by his own Menatep bank.
Indeed, if for Sakharov, imprisonment was the punishment for his ideals, for Khodorkovsky it proved to be an incubator. Note Glasser and Baker:
In his first 40 years, Khodorkovsky had been many things — a hustler and a banker, an oilman and a philanthropist — but never a political thinker or writer. Putin has turned Khodorkovsky into both.
On the other hand, it’s hard to deny that the man has changed. He has repudiated the privatisations of the 90s that made his own fortune, and even gone so far as to call for a ‘left turn’ in Russian politics,
denouncing the liberals who had run Russia in the 1990s — and whom he had supported with millions of dollars. They were “dishonest or inconsistent,” “effete bohemians” who “cheated 90 percent of the population” and “turned a blind eye” to the corruption of privatization. They should feel “a sense of shame.” As for himself and his fellow oligarchs, “We were accomplices in their misdeeds and lies.”
Some of Khodorkovsky’s new positions have even confused his family and friends.
The most important issue, however, is the meaning of ‘dissident’ itself. In the West, the word has taken on a big moral hue that has distracted from its original meaning, which was often a pejorative in the USSR and remains less than positive in Russia.
As Benjamin Nathans points out in the current issue of the London Review of Books:
In Russia, disenchantment with the dissidents is almost as widespread as disenchantment with socialism.
And back in the USSR, the original dissidents were just about as unpopular among ordinary people as Khodorkovsky is now. Contrary to the hopes of Radio Liberty and Helsinky activists, they enjoyed very little support, much less than the legitimacy and support enjoyed by the state.
Because of their backgrounds in academia and art, their unabashedly highbrow tastes, and their residence in Moscow and St Petersburg, 70s era dissidents were derided as privileged, cosmopolitan poseurs disconnected from the more prosaic struggles of the common people.
Their calls for abstract rights was seen as a luxury by most Soviets, whose pressing needs were often of more basic survival such as finding groceries or a place to live. The dissidents’ penchant for such foreign exoticisms as democracy and human rights, consumption of foreign radio and ties to Western rights organisations was seen as cryptic and unpatriotic. Moreover, the Jewish background of most dissidents did nothing to endear them to a population that generally viewed Jews with suspicion and prejudice.
All in all, their links with the West, their Bohemian lifestyles, their rejection of Soviet mores and their Jewishness made dissidents seem suspicious outsiders of dubious loyalty. Sort of the way the Red Staters and Tea Partiers in the US feel about the liberal intelligentsia.
Surprisingly little has changed since those days. Today, as in the 1970s, a majority of people still either passively accept or actively support the government and have a low opinion of dissidents, including Khodorkovsky.
As Glasser and Baker point out, “pockets of opposition emerge from time to time, but to little effect. On Khodorkovsky’s birthday last year, a handful of protesters near Red Square was arrested. No one much cared”.
And the parallels don’t stop there. According to Nathans, the central goal of the Sakharov-era dissidents was
a wish or a determination that the Soviet state should obey the letter of its own laws, especially those governing civil rights and due process.
That same modest and legalistic determination, that Russia follow its own laws, was precisely what motivated Khodorkovsky’s recent hunger strike.
But perhaps the most compelling reason to declare Khodorkovsky a dissident, (however reluctantly) is the same one that has made ordinary Russians hate him.
As Nathans writes,
The [Soviet] dissidents…engaged in ‘resistance without the people’ – a people who, in the meantime, had become literate and urbanised, if not exactly urbane. In keeping with their law-based strategy, the dissidents aimed to sway the hearts and minds of Soviet lawmakers. When that failed, they turned to foreign journalists in the hope of shaping Western public opinion, where they succeeded spectacularly
Khodorkovsky, the Westernised and Western-looking billionaire, is also waging a campaign of resistance without the people. His feud is and always has been with the very top- with Putin; he has not cared to take the conflict to the masses, preferring instead to use the foreign media and a small handful of Russian intellectuals to deliver his message.
In this way, Khodorkovsky falls far short of the revolutionary hero that Russia needs: but then again, so had the dissidents themselves.
.
5 Comments So Far»
Do you honestly think Russia needs another “revolutionary hero”? It seems to me that the Motherland has suffered enough men of big ideas in the last century.
One of the problems with the Brezhev-era dissident milieu was that it had a large degree of intolerance and dogmatism, which ironically mirrored the dogmatism and intolerance of the official sphere. Maybe for this reason we see the “double disenchantment” referred to by Nathans. (As someone said: “If Solzhenitsyn came to power, he would hang Sakharov. If Sakharov came to power, his wife would hang Solzhenitsyn.”)
Also brings to mind this comment by the novelist Sergei Dovlatov: “Next to Communists, I hate anti-Communists the most.”
But regarding the views of ordinary people, it must have been hard to find them out in a society which put such limits on free inquiry. The fact that the Soviet state put such a priority on spying on, controlling, censoring and restricting its own population implies that there was a lot of latent discontent, no matter how placid things appeared on the surface. This is why talk of staunch “Soviet patriotism” makes me skeptical (that, plus the fact that the Soviet state disappeared almost overnight).
And for your amusement: there’s a very upscale wine bar & restaurant here in Moscow called the “Dissident.” It’s located at, of all places, Lubyanka:
http://www.dissident.msk.ru/index2.html
Here we go again with Vadim. Khodorkovsky is a dissident in the sense of the Russian term of “one who thinks differently” and who dissents against the powers that be.
His gravest crime seems to be that he violated the basic power deal that Putin and company made with the oligarchs, which boiled down to this: “Take as much as you want, but don’t get into politics or media.”
The question to ask is: is Khodorkovsky a prisoner of conscience, in the old classic sense as once defined by Amnesty International, a person who has not used or advocated violence who has not committed a crime in the universally-understood notion of a crime, i.e. not a violation of a Soviet-style law like “deliberate defamation of the socialist order” which is a violation of internationally-understood definitions of free speech.
And the answer is, no, not as far as we can tell. But what we can tell is that he is a victim of punitive justice, who has suffered excessive punishment, such as incarceration in remote Chita, and retrial on new charges that were freshly “discovered” and thousands of procedural violations that have been aptly documented by his very credible attorneys who also take up human rights cases. That can’t be refuted. You can go on and on all you like about Khodorkovsky serving as a poor mascot for the cause of liberal democracy, but you can’t jump over these facts: the procedural violations are outrageous, the punishment is excessive, and for a “white-collar crime” of this sort, one has to ask why fines or payment of alleged back taxes or other means of compensation would not be used instead of humiliating and harsh imprisonment.
I’m not so sure that such an abject apology is needed for the businessmen of the 1990s. I think people forget the context, which itself was lawless. Unless you violated the law, the chances of getting your enterprise registered and functioning were slim. Everyone depended on the “roof” of some other entity, state, semi-state or outright mafia. Protection was paid everywhere. It fosters a tendency not to report income, not to create the tax base needed to provide adequate social services, and so on.
One of the reasons I don’t appreciate Ben Nathan’s work as much as I should (and which you tendentiously quote here) is that he is constantly framing the issues in a moral-equivalency magnetic field, where he constantly wants the Soviet dissidents to do the work of American intellectuals in attacking the Reagan or Bush administrations, and they never do it sufficiently to his taste. But that isn’t their job and he is revisionist on them anyway given that Sakharov, the pre-eminent leader of the human rights movement, justified his work on the Soviet hydrogen bomb because of what he saw as the need for a balance of power in the world given the Americans’ possession and use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Ben seems to want the Soviets to stand in as scapegoats for economic privation in Russia just as much as the duplicitious and cunning Kremlin ideologues. He can’t rest until Soviet dissidents prove themselves as by being enlisted in the sort of “progressive” leftist movement that Ben wishes were more successful in his own country.
A large part of why the Russian public believes as they do about Soviet dissidents (and that is more nuanced than Ben or you seem prepared to believe) is that there is no free press, and a huge tsunami of propaganda directed against these people in outrageous ways, making them seem like puppets of the West or criminal and even sinister characters. Hearing such propaganda for years, it’s no wonder people hate them.
And Ben’s characterization that Soviet dissidents couldn’t reach people who were urban and educated and uninterested is completely off base. There were many passive sympathizers and helpers. A lot more than Ben knows about because he wasn’t there and is tuning into this topic decades after it passed. And the harassment and punishment of people with repercussions against them at work or against their families if they had anything to do with dissent was really harsh and worked very well to discourage many good people.
Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn were two different strands of Russian dissent, to be sure, representing a kind of “left’ and “right” or a major difference in strategies for dealing with Soviet power. Neither of them would have done any hanging, nor would their wives. I don’t know where people come up with this sort of tripe. It’s from reading the Soviet press I guess.
You’re wrong that the word “dissident” was repugnant in Russia. It was used by intellectuals sometimes with slight irony, especially if the Latin word “dissidenty”. But inokomyslyashchiy has an honourable history and is not tainted in the way you are now tendentiously claiming.
I always have to wonder why people like you have to work so hard to discredit the Soviet dissidents, Vadim. You have them to thank for your very existence. It would never, ever occur to me to trounce and discredit and snarily bully the greats that have gone before me in my country who fought for civil rights and intellectual and artistic freedom as well as social justice, whether Allen Ginsburg or Dorothy Day or Norman Thomas or Bayard Rustin or Martin Luther King, Jr. I don’t require that they be paragons of virtue or perfectly attuned in their ideologies to appreciate their sacrifices and achievements.
Why don’t we have an equivalent figure like Khodorkovsky, and only have figures like Madoff who are not remotely similar?
Um, I guess that would be because we don’t throw businessmen in jail as a rule except for really grave crimes, and our countries are not really similar or equivalent as you imagine.
I’m glad you’ve adopted my definition of you as a “neo-perestroika liberal,” except I don’t ever remember any of them back in the day ever being as vicious as you are on certain topics or as eager to discredit those who had “sat,” unlike themselves. They had a sense of shame about doing so.
Soviet dissidents and today’s less-than-sterling successor of their cause, Khodorkovsky, do not fall short as revolutionary heroes whatsoever. You do. What is your excuse?
I think what is missed about Khodorkovsky is his incredible ability at changing with the political winds to further his own goals. In the 1980s he was a good komsomolets, the late 1980s a good entrepreneur, the 1990s a good crook, 2000s a charitable citizen, and now he’s a good “dissident.” He has everyone fooled, as the amount of chatter about his “hunger strike” proves. I would bet good money that at the end of the day Khodorkovsky cares about democracy etc as much as Putin does.
Let us also not forget that this so-called “dissident” was one of the power brokers behind giving Russia Mr. Putin.
8 Pingback & Trackback
Leave Comments Below»