Khordorkovsky Guilty?

We'll never know the truth of the matter. Perhaps he was a squeaky-clean upstanding billionaire freedom fighter who got chewed up in the gears of the barely camouflaged communists still in power, or perhaps he was a manipulating insider with personal grudges against those in control wanting to wrest power away from them and got spanked in the process. Who knows? It's probably somewhere in between, but I don't think that there are a whole lot of "white as the driven snow" types in Russia after the mind control of Soviet Communism for 70 years. As an example, even in the Czech Republic, a country which had the seventh largest economy in the world between WWI and WWII and whose mayors of Prague were penpals of the mayors of Paris, some of the more bizarre effects of communism are still felt to this day. Although abandoned by the West and controlled by Moscow after WWII, the Czech Republic was no lapdog and even went through a brief uprising in 1968 called the Prague Spring which was ruthlessly crushed with Soviet Tanks. The Czechs were certainly no bootlickers and tried desparately to maintain their identity while being brainwashed by communism.

Now, sixteen years after the fall of communism, the Czech Republic is a full member of the European Union and yet to this day there is a saying there which goes, "if you are not stealing from your employer, you are stealing from your family." Perhaps that puts the mind-rotting nature of the effects of communism into perspective? Is Khodorkovsky guilty? Depends on which idealogy you are using I suppose. But, as far as I am concerned, anyone who has the word "dork" in his last name probably deserves what he gets!!