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Here I am looking at that house on St. Bart's and feeling so bad that this is what the freedom of the citizens of Russia was sold for. It's time to stop using the Native Americans who sold Manhattan for $24 as the standard example of an unfair deal. Think instead about a popularly elected president who won his first election (fairly!) with 57 percent of the vote, only to barter everything for a house with a terrace in the Caribbean. A cool, objective look at the Yeltsin era confronts us with a dismal and disagreeable truth, one that explains Putin's rise to power: there never were any democrats in government in post-Soviet Russia, let alone freedom-championing liberals who opposed conservatives desperate to resuscitate the U.S.S.R. The whole lot of them-with rare exceptions...were an unholy horde of hypocritical thieves and lowlifes. They were aroused for a time by democratic rhetoric in order, within the framework of the political contest of the time, to be on the same side as the Kremlin, as the authorities. That was the only thing that mattered to them; along with, most important, the opportunities for self-enrichment.
The whole bunch of them have always regarded power as a cash cow, and they still do. The feudal allocation of land for sustenance. Power equals money. Power equals opportunities. Power equals a comfortable life for you and your family, and everything you do while in power is aimed at retaining it. That is why all these functionaries were loyal members of the CPSU and never once inclined toward dissidence (none of the, including Yeltsin, who, despite the PR myth, never relinquished his seat in the ruling bureaucracy). Then, still ensconced in their old offices, they gravitated to the ideological niche of "capitalist democrats" and were agreeably surprised to find how much personal property they were allowed to accumulate under the new economic dispensations. "Elections," "freedom of speech," and ridiculous "human rights" were by no means an obligatory appendage to their Swiss bank accounts. They drifted toward a new stance as "patriotic conservatives deploring the collapse of our glorious U.S.S.R.," an entirely organic, stress-free metamorphosis.
I do not believe in karma or predestination, but as I am writing this, I feel the fates are mocking me. I feel I am being made to pay for my blind support of Yeltsin despite his disregard for the law. I don't like the way Putin set out to kill me. But what was it I said when Yeltsin, who appointed Putin, was blasting away at the parliament with tanks? A reminder: I said, "It's long overdue. There should be no mercy for these irredeemable morons cluttering up the parliament."
What about those privatization loans-for-shares auctions, when the nation's major natural resource enterprises were handed over for free to people appointed from above to be oligarchs? Those, after all, were not only fundamentally shameless and immoral but also completely illegal in purely formal terms. People who wanted to get in on the act and compete for the best bits of what remained of the U.S.S.R. were barred, using the same ridiculous pretexts as those used nowadays to sideline election candidates. And when they took the matter to the courts, they were smirked at in just the same way the prosecutors smirked in the trumped-up cases against me. My comrades are being squeezed out of the political field year after year. Not only are we prevented from taking office, but any connection with our organization, even just a monetary donation, is threatened with inspections or even criminal prosecution. And that has all been done by the very people whose right to bombard the parliament, to falsify elections "for the sake of reform," and to drive the Communists and nationalists out of politics "for the sake of the future" I so fervently defended.
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