As someone from former USSR, here's my take: the reason Khodorkovsky went to jail is because he violated the law of thieves, he stood up to Putin's bullying. If

As someone from former USSR, here's my take: the reason Khodorkovsky went to jail is because he violated the law of thieves, he stood up to Putin's bullying. If there was an across-the-board principled anti-corruption effort it would be a different matter, but there wasn't. I am tired of hearing Western's justify Putin's thuggery. I personally come from Belarus, where a president that was democratically elected on anti-corruption charges assumed the role of a dictator. This was well expected by most of the intelligentsia: on the day of the run off election where Lukashenko's win (against another shitbird, of course, who ended up siding with Lukashenko afterwards) was confirmed my brother called us and told us to lookup 'Sulla' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulla http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulla) in a history book. The practice of using "crusade against corruption" to assume dictatorial role is as old as democracy itself. That said Putin is far more pernicious than Lukashenko: with Lukashenko there is no longer any more of a pretense of democracy than there was under, e.g., Saddam in Iraq (there are elections with mythical sounding figures and no campaigns). Putin is far more cunning: he's able to maintain the facade of democracy while having unchecked and unelected power. With recent revelations about "enhanced interrogations", NSA and FISA kangaroo courts, US -- while light years far from turning into a Russia or Belarus -- is starting to show some of these very same dangerous signs of police state(1) tactics via plausible deniability. I'll leave this quote out there on the topic of rule by robber barrons (which the oligarchs were plain and simple) vs. rule by thugs on a moral crusade: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C.S. Lewis (1) Here I am using the historical definition of police state: while today it's equated with totalitarianism (and neither Russia nor Belarus -- much less United States even under the worse scenario -- are totalitarian states, as anyone living in those countries who has also lived under Soviet rule can attest), the original meaning contrasted a 'polizeistaat' (rule by decree without any constitutional limitations) with a 'rechtstaat' (rights state -- constitutionally limited rule of law). As a side note, it is unfortunate that the privatization process was botched enormously in USSR and its successor states. I always thought that the right approach to privatization should have been to follow the old Leninist slogan _literally_: factories to workers, farms to peasants, i.e., give the employees non-trivial amounts of shares/options in their workplace. Instead it became "factories and farms to corrupt middle managers and old Soviet elite".