Communists Become Billioners With U.S. Advising On Cooking and Doctoring
Barry Marjanovich
Young oil baron worth about $7 billion is adopting more open business
practices.
By Mark McDonald
Knight Ridder Newspapers
September 15, 2002
MOSCOW, Russia -- The wealthiest man in Russia, a 39-year-old oil baron
with a net worth of $7 billion, started out as a red-blooded Communist
Party flunky, a whiz-kid chemistry major whose wildest dream was to
become, get this, the manager of a factory.
Instead, he became one of the fine young cannibals who by many accounts,
including his own, swindled their way to wealth and power amid the
chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union. Now he's the CEO of Yukos, the
second largest oil company in oil-rich Russia.
But Mikhail Khodorkovsky isn't behaving like most of his billionaire
brethren, the oligarchs, as Russia's rapacious captains of industry are
known. Some analysts think he's leading a tentative but promising new
move toward adopting Western-style business practices in Russia.
PricewaterhouseCoopers now audits and polishes his books while a U.S. PR
firm audits and polishes his image. He takes English lessons and travels
monthly to Britain and the United States on business. He's donated
millions to museums and charities, an unprecedented philanthropy for
Russian "biznesmeny."
Khodorkovsky owns 36 percent of Yukos, which produces some 17 percent of
Russia's oil, and he's taking the company into the natural gas and power
generation businesses.
"Transparency and good corporate governance are the rules of the game
now," Khodorkovsky said at Yukos' plain-brown headquarters in Moscow.
"The more developed our market, the stricter those rules need to be."
A decade ago, there were no rules. Mikhail Gorbachev was out, Boris
Yeltsin was in, and the state property of the Soviet Union were sold at
rigged auctions for fractions of their real worth. One of those prizes
was Yukos, and in 1995, Khodorkovsky got it for a song -- after his own
bank, Menatep, organized the bidding.
Khodorkovsky was 32 when he snatched Yukos, and since then he has kept
control of the company with some of the most creative corporate moves
this side of Enron -- defaulting on nearly a quarter-billion dollars in
loans; hiding assets in shell companies and offshore accounts and
issuing piles of new stock to dilute the votes of opposing shareholders.
"I don't condemn him out of hand," said Peter Oppenheimer, longtime
professor of economics at Britain's Oxford University. "Bear in mind, of
course, that he's a crook. But then, so is everyone else."
BusinessWeek
SEPTEMBER 3, 2002
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK
By Richard S. Dunham
Remember Dreary Moscow? Forget It
Today, it's a combination of Washington, New York, and L.A. It's
vibrant,
growing, and full of the contradictions of a changing culture
The statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Russian KGB secret
police,
has been removed and his name stripped from the KGB's Metro stop. These
days,
it is known as Lubyanka after the infamous Stalin-era building that once
housed KGB headquarters and in which the feared agency's successor
organization remains busy at work.
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The "Sacred" Communist Name "DINAMO" Once Again In Croatia
"DINAMO" Zagreb
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Dinamo Moscow was not founded in 1923, it took its present
name that year. The club was started by workers at the Morozov
cotton mills in 1887. The owners of the mill came from Blackburn,
so the team's colors were (and remain) Blackburn blue and white.
After the Revolution, Cheka chief Felix Dzerzhinsky changed the
name to Dinamo and established them as the secret police team, which was
replicated across eastern Europe.
--
Thlayli
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Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky (b. Sept. 11, 1877, Vilna province,
Russia,
in modern Lithuania - d. July 20, 1926, Moscow), Bolshevik leader who
was head of the first secret police organization in Soviet Russia.
Son of a Polish nobleman, Dzerzhinsky joined the Kaunas (Kovno)
organization in the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party in 1895. He
became a party organizer, and, although arrested by the Russian
Imperial
Police for his revolutionary activities five times between 1897 and
1908, he became a leader of the Polish-Lithuanian Social Democratic
Party and was influential in convincing his colleagues to unite with
the
Russian Social Democrats in 1906. Afterward, as a close follower of
Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social
Democratic
Party, Dzerzhinsky pursued his revolutionary activities within the
Russian Empire and in western Europe. Arrested for the sixth time in
1912, he remained in captivity until after the February Revolution of
1917.
Elected to the Bolshevik Party's Central Committee in July 1917,
Dzerzhinsky played an active role in the October Revolution (1917) and
on Dec. 20 *Dec. 7, old style) 1917, was named head of the new
All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution
and
Sabotage (Cheka; after 1922 called OGPU), which became Soviet Russia's
security police agency. For the next several years Cheka spread terror,
contributing to the general chaos in Russia by arbitrarily executing
real and alleged enemies of the Soviet state. Dzerzhinsky personally
acquired a reputation for being a ruthless and fanatical Communist.
During the Russo-Polish War (1919-20), when the Red Army was driving
the
anti-Bolshevik Polish forces westward, Dzerzhinsky became a member of
the Polish revolutionary committee that was intended to become the
Bolshevik government of Poland. But after the Soviet Army was forced to
retreat, he again concentrated on Russian affairs, and, remaining head
of the Cheka and commissar for internal affairs (after 1919), he became
commissar for transport (1921). As such, he greatly improved the
efficiency of the Soviet railroad system by reinstating "bourgeois
specialists" in administrative positions. In February, 1924, after he
became a firm supporter of Joseph Stalin, the secretary general of the
party, Dzerzhinsky was given control of the Supreme Economic Council
and
in May was also elected a candidate of the party's Politburo. In 1926,
however, during a session of the Central Committee at which the
country's
economic policies were being heatedly debated, Dzerzhinsky collapsed
and
died.
(Papa Mesic [Tovarish Josa] would be proud!)
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Communist Yugoslave President Stipe Mesic:
http://www.hkz.hr/Hrvatsko_slovo/2001/317/t26.htm
---
Slobodna Dalmacija
2000-09-18
"My three sons fought in the Croatian Liberation War."
http://www.kakarigi.net/croatia/news/dossier/eng/index.html
"I cannot allow Racan to talk about democracy because
that would be the same as a whore talking about chastity"
- pointed out Skeljo.
Ivica Racan is a former Secretary General of Yugo-slave
Communist Party. http://www.vido.ldh.org/images/serbia.jpg
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http://www.eurocritic.demon.co.uk/longroad.htm
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The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation was commissioned
by Congress to establish a memorial in Washington, D.C. to the
estimated 100 million victims of communism worldwide.
http://www.mindszenty.org/report/1998/feb98/feb98.html
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM
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