In this cinder-block town just outside Moscow, people do not have much sympathy for the jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and care little about the freezing of shares in his company or the turmoil that has convulsed Russia's financial markets for the past week. They have more pressing concerns, like the sidewalks. Or more precisely, the lack of them.
Mariya Grigoryevna Sadova, cane in hand, pointed to the rutted, muddy path she walks to get groceries. Then, eyes narrowing, she recalled a businessmen who recently had his driveway paved for his Mercedes.
"The rich are living on our poverty," said Sadova, 76.
While many Russians may think of the Oct. 25 arrest of Khodorkovsky, chief executive of the Yukos Oil Co, as an odd and distant event, it also has some appeal. Distrust of the wealthy runs deep in Russian society with its roots in peasant culture. Khodorkovsky and other tycoons are widely despised by many Russians, who see their quick fortunes, amassed in the economic chaos of the 1990s, as stolen, not earned.
"It is not an exaggeration to say that a bit more than half of society hates the rich," said Leonid Sedov, an analyst for the Russian Center for Public Opinion Research, an independent polling company.
"Dislike of rich people goes very deep," Sedov said. "They feel the rich did not get their money in an honest way. And in part, that is actually true."
Throughout history, most of Russia has been deeply distrustful of the wealthy. Serfdom was only abolished in the last half of the 19th century and the communists rose to power in the first half of the 20th. The new class of wealthy Russians that emerged with the collapse of the Soviet system is barely a decade old.
"In Russia, the system is still in its very beginnings," said Alexander Akhiyezer, a Russian historian at the Russian Academy of Sciences. "You think Russia is its intelligentsia, its Dostoyevsky, its Pushkin. But that is a very narrow part. It's a big village. It's peasants."
The turmoil that ensued since Khodorkovsky's arrest has for the most part been just a distant flicker on most Russians' television screens. Few are invested in the stock market, so its plunge last week was barely noticed in most homes.
With elections approaching -- for Parliament in December and for the presidency in March -- many political analysts argued the Khodorkovsky arrest would be popular with voters. In Khimki, it struck a chord.
"I'm on my feet working 12 hours a day," said Galina Novosytsova, 45, a cashier at a sausage shop in a local food market. "I have no savings, no car, no mobile phone. They got factories just like that."
Despite distrust of the rich, public opinion experts say the real picture is much more nuanced. A survey last week of 1,000 people found that while 18 percent approved of Khodorkovsky's arrest, 19 percent were unhappy about it; 40 percent chose not to answer the question. The survey was conducted in Moscow, by far Russia's richest city.
Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist, argues that an aggressive campaign on television, now tightly controlled by the state, has had an effect.. Starting in early spring, talk shows discussed whether Russian property should be taken back from the wealthy business executives who grabbed it during the privatizations of the 1990s.
"They were preparing public opinion for this," she said. "This was very well thought out. They are playing on people's prejudices."
The arrest might have appealed to other, darker prejudices, too, said Kryshtanovskaya. Khodorkovsky's father is Jewish, as are most of Russia's other tycoons.
Anti-Semitism did not drive the arrest -- the Russian government has long since given up state-sponsored anti-Semitism -- but it might have made it more palatable to a public that still harbors some deep-seated anti-Jewish sentiments.
Alexander Gelman, a Jewish playwright, said he did not see anti-Semitism in the arrest. Putin, he said, recently appointed a Jewish man as his representative in the northwest region of Russia, an important post.
"If he was Russian, they would think the same thing -- this man got rich not thanks to his own work, but thanks to some wily maneuvering," Gelman said.
Sedov said the state's attack on Khodorkovsky and his empire appeared to place Russia firmly in the past, in a time when business was always firmly under the control of the government.
"In the Russian system, power always dominated," he said. "There was never that much respect for wealth. Now those traditions are coming back to the surface -- the goal of the elite is to get close to power."
Indeed, the tycoons themselves have kept quiet. Unlike three years ago, when another tycoon, Vladimir Gusinsky, was pressured out of his media business by the Kremlin, the rich and powerful have not spoken out to defend Khodorkovsky.
"The business elite is panicked," said Kryshtanovskaya. "They are not coming together. They are not confronting power. They think it's dangerous to ruin relations with power, and think they will be able to make their own agreements."
different opinions
In Khimki, young people had decidedly different opinions from those of their parents. Very few judged Khodorkovsky for his wealth. Most said they, too, would have tried to take advantage of loose rules in order to profit.
"I have only respect for him," said Yevgeny Morozov, 30, who works as a cook in a restaurant in Moscow. "He was smart. He acted fast. He wasn't lazy."
The current situation is simply uncharted territory, said Yury Levada, founder of the Center for Public Opinion Research.
"Russia has just never had rich oligarchs," he said. "For most of history, power did what it wanted to people."
As for the government's aggressive inquiry into Yukos, he said: "I don't think it can go too far. There are a lot of rational people in our country. The country has come a really long way."
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