LONDON: I hope nothing too unpleasant happens to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, believed by many to be Russia’s richest man, while he is in prison. I do not think it will. He has some of the most powerful organizations in the world on his side. Whether it is the White House-to-boardroom-to-think tank merry-go-round of Washington, or British oil companies and their lobbyist Tony Blair, or the western media, into which the agenda of the financial pages inexorably leaks, there is always going to be someone to shine a spotlight on his cell.

I am not so sure about his compatriots. It has been interesting over the past few days to hear US diplomats, British officials and stuffed suits from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development talking with passion about the sanctity of private property and the importance of the rule of law.

Interesting because this kind of thing — the rule of law, the sanctity of human life, never mind property — doesn’t seem to have much bothered eager investors in Vladimir Putin’s Russia until now, when suddenly it is their money that looks at risk.

I am more worried about the other 900,000 prisoners in Russia’s vile jails, including 145,000 on remand awaiting trial. I’m worried about the 37,000 prisoners with HIV and the 86,000 with tuberculosis.

I’m worried about the Russian journalists being killed and kidnapped when they try to report on corruption. I’m worried about the hundreds of Chechens who have disappeared without trace and the unpunished thuggery of Putin’s butchers and bullies in that sad part of the Russian Caucasus.

Various theories have been advanced for why the Kremlin decided to move against Khodorkovsky and begin, at least, to unpack his oil company, Yukos. There has been talk of a power struggle within the administration between old Yeltsinites and another faction which wants to see more state control of industry.

There has been speculation about Kremlin anger over Khodorkovsky’s support for Grigory Yavlinsky, the articulate, sympathetic, English-speaking and largely ineffectual liberal politician. Both may be true. The participants in the power struggle may even believe them. But no one ever lost their shirt in Russian politics by betting on the most cynical and simplest explanation.

Could it be that the new patrons in the Kremlin, Putin and his appointees, are bitter because they never had the chance to share out the riches of Russia’s natural resources among their clientele, as Yeltsin did before them?

The indignation outside Russia about the possible reordering of Yukos, which made a profit of $3bn last year, comes from an assumption in the west about privatisation which says as much about us as it does about Russia.

The assumption is that if a company is privatized once, it can’t be privatised again. But what if Russians are more clear- eyed about the true nature of privatisation than the westerners who encouraged them to do it back in the early 1990s? Westerners who were — at least in the case of the Europeans — not simply promoting a policy tested in their own countries, but attempting to hallow a policy which in the west was highly contentious, and remains so.

Perhaps the reason the Kremlin feels comfortable about nationalizing or even re-privatizing parts of supposedly privatized industries is that the Russian kleptocracy never really believed what the western advocates of privatization so want us all to believe, that an industry which is privatized magically transforms itself into a lean, competitive, consumer- friendly beast run by risk-loving entrepreneurs.

They saw immediately what Russian privatization really was, an extreme version of the western kind, with all its failings: serving shareholders instead of customers; exploiting monopolies; taking government subsidies in the front door and paying dividends to shareholders out the back; effecting a form of legal embezzlement by showering directors with pay, perks and share options.

Consider the dividends the privatized oil firms have been paying out. Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea with his and still had plenty of spare change. Yukos has just decided to pay a dividend of $2bn to its shareholders, the lion’s share of which would go to Khodorkovsky.

Khodorkovsky did not create Yukos. He did not discover the oil, build the refineries, lay the pipelines, put up the oil towns on which the wealth of Yukos was built. That was done by the Soviet Union and its people. And yet in western financial circles Khodorkovsky is treated as if he was something like an entrepreneur, as if he had earned the moral as well as the legal right to suck hundreds of millions out of the Russian oilfields into his own pocket.

No wonder there is so much concern in the west about Khodorkovsky’s humiliation. It’s a smudged, cracked, crooked mirror, but the overpaid private bureaucrats running our privatized industries, who fantasize that, like Bill Gates, they are genuine entrepreneurs worthy of their share options, can just about recognize their faces in there.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.