Putin has let one of the major players in the bandit wars of the 1990s out of prison a few months early, and now this is suddenly big news.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky was one of several puppets who were hired by the KGB to pretend there were capitalism and democracy in Russia. Khodorkovsky was the most stupid among these pretty dim-witted “oligarchs”. He convinced himself that the money he’d been given was actually his and started giving himself airs of a businessman. Finally, Putin put this murderer and gangster in jail.
In the 10 years he spent in jail, Khodorkovsky kept giving money to a variety of Russian artists, writers, journalists, intellectuals, and human rights activists. In return, they created an image of him as some kind of dissident and victim of the regime. The whole thing was absolutely hilarious. The human rights organizations in Russia paid no attention to the many actual abuses committed in the country and, instead, created a huge campaign defending the billionaire’s right to lead a billionaire lifestyle in jail.
I’m guessing Khodorkovsky will now join his former employees in the UK. This is a country that harbors many gangsters who are on the run from justice in Russia. Why the UK is so intent on inviting as much of this human refuse from Russia as possible to stay is a mystery.
Clarissa's Blog 
Pussy Riot were pardoned too. I don’t really follow Russian politics, so I’ve no idea what the context of all this was, and I’d appreciate it if someone told me about it.
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Today read 2 posts in Russian on the topic:
How “we are one people” (with Ukranians) propaganda has led some Russians to subversive (from Putin’s pov) interpretations:
http://taki-net.livejournal.com/1685066.html#comments
Funny:
http://morreth.livejournal.com/2140859.html#comments
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Khodorkovsky left Russia already.
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What always amazes me about the “activism” from Russia that reaches us, is how balantly it caters to the international press and not Russians themselves. And nobody fucking notices it.
“Look at this artist! Trying to inform his people of the corruption in this land!”
“But if this is targeted at his people, why is it in English?”
“Umm…”
Besides, I have don’t believe Russians need to be informed about their corrupt system. Every time I have asked a Russian expat about their birthplace, the first thing they told me how horribly corrupt every single government pencil pusher is.
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“What always amazes me about the “activism” from Russia that reaches us, is how balantly it caters to the international press and not Russians themselves. And nobody fucking notices it.”
– YES. You are absolutely right. This all started in the early 1990s where one could make a good living getting handouts from the Westerners to create a fiction of defending human rights in a way that would please the grant-givers.
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Yes, the UK doesn’t invite these oligarchical bastards, they just arrive and as a more tolerant democracy than the USA, we don’t want to discourage them. BTW, this ‘we’ doesn’t include most actual people, just the rich, ruling class, who benefit from the system.. But some of us actual people do notice what’s going on, honest!
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