Why Not A Closer Russian Mirror?

Comment submitted to Moscow Times. For all the poorer Russians almost robbed of their country's natural resources, and the stupidity of some Russians that think that people like Khodorovsky are 'great' enterpreneurs (what's so difficult in making money out of oil wells? Ask the Arab oil sheikhs.)


http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/06/08/007.html

I refer to the article above and the writer’s interesting 'bring back' to the 1930s. Then I wondered why he/she did not care to bring readers back to Russia's history in the 1980s & 1990s, and the lessons from the collapse of the old Soviet Union. It would perhaps be more educational to the whole world if he/she had done that.

People like me may live afar but do wonder how a few Russians like Khodorovsky and Abramovich could have had so much money to buy up those highly lucrative‘assets’ of theirs that created so much wealth for them in such a short time.

To me, their ‘successes’ were ‘fairy tales’ too good to be true. If it was so easy, past Russian communist leaders would not have been that dumb not to realize that and therefore let a few of these ‘Khodorovskies’ develop within the communist system, and then parade them in front of the world as prove of communist or Russian supremacy!

On the other hand, if democracy is really so ‘magical’, I wondered then where are the‘Khodorovskies’ of the Russian manufacturing or IT sectors?

I also wondered how the likes of Khodorovsky could have gotten the money to buy those ‘easy money assets’ they ended up having. You see, people like me still remember the widely held 'reports' before the 1990s that all Russians are poor people because of their ‘ineffective’ communist system. So unless people like Khodorovsky had got a sudden ‘windfall from the skies’ as the empire collapsed, or they got their ‘assets’ on the cheap.

Whatever the case, there are probably valuable lessons the whole world can learn from the history of your country during the 1980s and 1990s. Sadly, this was not to be the case for the writer of this article who chose to look into a distant mirror instead of the one much closer. I wonder why?