Roman Abramovich loses his billions because he went with the flow/photo from the Channel 24 archive
The reasoning of Russians in the spirit of “we are all hostages of the madness of one person” is nothing more than another convenient, but untenable manipulation. What is the value of a country, a society, a nation that cannot oppose anything to evil?
Separately, it must be said about the Russian elites. The elites are by no means the best people of the nation, but those who manage to concentrate more wealth and control in their hands.
Normally, however, they should strive to maintain the status quo and (thus) their acquisitions. That is, as a result, to play a stabilizing role, diverting the nation and the state mechanism from movements that can destroy the status quo.
The collapse of the elite strategy
In this sense, the Russian post-Soviet elites of the first generation, of course, demonstrated their weakness and failure.
Over the past 15-20 years, they have followed the “two pockets” strategy. Deciding not to try to influence the domestic political situation, they switched to the tactics of “we earn in Russia – we securitize and save capital in the West.” It was this model that Abramovich and the shareholders of Alfa Group followed, and at their smaller level, hundreds and hundreds of others.
At some point, this strategy looked selfish, but more rational and advantageous than Khodorkovsky's unsuccessful attempt to “get into a fight.” , they came to a paradoxical ending: having unleashed this completely insane war, the oprichnina dealt a crushing blow to their capital “securitized” in the West. As well as the dream of a quiet retirement in Spain, Italy or Greece of thousands of other “fellow travelers of the oprichnina”.
In general, Mikhail Fridman complains not quite rightly, but what happened has its own rigid logic. One way or another, this example fully claims a place in political science textbooks for explaining the relationship between elite strategies, guarantees for the protection of property, and the system of checks and balances in politics.
