The Bolshevik Who Thinks ‘The Nation’ Is Too Left Wing
his is what it’s like to cast the only vote in the Russian Duma against the annexation of Crimea. In the first days and weeks after the vote, you start to feel alienated by your fellow lawmakers, according to Ilya Ponomarev, the only Russian lawmaker who did such a thing. He said some of his friends and allies in his own voting bloc didn’t return his calls, wouldn’t acknowledge him, or take his meetings. “It was very alienating,” he said.
The next phase is when they prepare the charges against you. For Ponomarev this happened when he was on a business trip to California this summer. It was August. “Kremlin liaisons to the Duma started calling me,” he said. “They asked if I am returning. I said, ‘Of course I am returning.’ I had my tickets for Aug. 30.” But he also got the sense the something was in the offing. By Aug. 20, Ponomarev said he learned that all of his Russian assets were frozen. “All my credit cards were not working, I only had $21 in my pocket,” he said. “This was another message.”
And then Ponomarev found himself facing charges for improperly taking money out of the Skolkovo Foundation, a fund for high tech start ups with which he works closely. “The charges are totally fabricated,” he said. “This is about my vote on Crimea.”
Ponomarev says he intends to one day return to Russia, but he doesn’t know when that day will be. So he is stuck in America, making a little scratch doing some research for a high tech company he declined to name.
“These legal charges that exist right now, they will be over within eight months; that’s when the investigation will be over,” he told The Daily Beast. “By May, I am pretty sure they will try to invent something else. But this particular thing will be over. I really hope next year I can go back. I am doing everything to be able to return, but it could be a long time.”
“No leftists should support Putin, why do you? Putin is an enemy of your values.”
At this point in the profile, it’s supposed to emerge that Ponomarev is the kind of well-meaning liberal Americans like to imagine their dissidents to be. But Ponomarev did not grow up memorizing the Federalist Papers and he is not particularly loved by others in Russia’s opposition. Ponomarev even has a soft spot for Bolshevism, which is strange because he has spent most of his professional life as an entrepreneur.
Over cut melon and coffee at Washington’s swank Mayflower Hotel, Ponomarev described himself at one point as a libertarian communist. And his unlikely biography supports this enigmatic label. In the 1990s Ponomarev was a very young businessman and software engineer who helped build up Yukos, a massive Russian oil concern that is today defunct. By 2002, he was still a technology entrepreneur, but he also became the chief information officer for Russia’s Communist Party, a post he held until 2007.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/26/the-bolshevik-who-thinks-the-nation-is-too-left-wing.html