Word: mikhail
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...Litvinenko murder investigation, in fact, may have a profound effect on the image of President Vladimir Putin in the West - much like the Chechen war of 1999 did, or the dismembering the oil company Yukos and the imprisonment of its CEO, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, or the Beslan terror tragedy. Each time, Putin chose a course of action that benefited his regime in short term, but deeply hurt his country's interests in the long term...
...such as Alexei Kondaurov, who, as a major-general of the kgb's Fifth Main Directorate, was responsible for crushing ideological subversion in Soviet days. Kondaurov is now a member of the Duma's Communist Party faction, and campaigns tirelessly on behalf of his friend and former employer, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who once headed Yukos, Russia's biggest private oil company. Khodorkovsky is currently in jail after having been convicted on tax evasion and fraud charges that he says are bogus. "I'm amazed at myself," says Kondaurov. "A former kgb major-general, and yes, I do feel...
Kondaurov and others argue that the Russian authorities are terrified of the sort of "people power" that brought Viktor Yushchenko and Mikhail Saakashvili to power in Ukraine and Georgia. He sees a new dissident movement as "the only option," because power in today's Russia is now so concentrated in the hands of the Kremlin that any other opposition is futile. "It's very much the same as the case was in Soviet times," Kondaurov says...
Dmitrievsky and others are seeking to protect and reclaim freedoms won in the final years of the Soviet Union, when Mikhail Gorbachev introduced his policy of glasnost, or greater openness. Later, in the immediate post-Soviet era, Boris Yeltsin presided over a scrappy, imperfect democratic flowering. Activists say that, since he took office in 2000, Putin has tried to bottle up the explosion of interest in human rights, free speech and democratic accountability that took place in the 1990s. Says Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the few remaining independents in parliament: "The regime has achieved a state of total manipulation...
...Mikhail Khodorkovsky Founder and former chairman, Yukos Oil Once one of Russia's richest men, he fell afoul of the Kremlin by taking an independent political stand and lost everything. Yukos has been dismembered, and Khodorkovsky, 43, who is serving an eight-year sentence in a Siberian jail on fraud charges he vigorously disputes, has become a symbol of the political nature of Russian justice. Before being jailed, he spoke to a newspaper about the aspirations of his compatriots: "They need democracy, because these are people who don't want to feel uncomfortable when talking to the police, these...