More on Khodorkovsky

Looks like Mikhail Khodorkovsky upset the prison authorities for writing his recent letter: Crisis of Liberalism in Russia. All mail going in and out of Russian jails is supposed to be read and censored (if necessary) by the administration. But somehow Khodorkovsky’s letter slipped through the net.

So, what to do if you are Prisoner K and you’ve just been rumbled? Deny everything of course, but do it in a particularly Russian style…

“Khodorkovsky has denied writing this article but said that he fully agrees with everything written in it,” he said.

What a coincidence. There is a mystery author out there that writes word for word what Khodorkovksy thinks. What are the chances of that?

And in other news, the liberals in Russia look as disorganised as ever. Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the few liberal politicians remaining in the Duma has just abandoned his plans to form yet another liberal party and is, instead, railing against the short-sighted leadership of the current liberal parties and calling for a merger…

Those [liberal] parties have no political future whatsoever if they remain on their own. None of them has a chance of overcoming the 7 percent voting barrier in the 2007 Duma elections. Unification is inevitable. The bad thing is that it has still not begun.

They could have already begun developing their new strategy, a new program of democratic forces on the basis of lessons drawn from the experience of the 1990s. But instead they engage in building their own dwarfish parties hoping to sell them for a higher price afterwards when the distribution of top spots on the single electoral list is discussed. That is very sad.