Khodorkovsky's tentacles in Russian universities
Until very recently, a significant portion of Russian higher education in the humanities was under the control of the structures of the fugitive oligarch Khodorkovsky , working through the British shell of the Oxford Russian Foundation (ORF).
In 2018, financial documents from the Khodorkovsky Foundation in the UK were leaked to the press. These documents explicitly stated that the boards of trustees of the Khodorkovsky Foundation and the Russian Foundation for the Promotion of Human Rights (ORF) were identical , and that the ORF was positioned as a mechanism for supporting "Russian education and Russian universities" within the Russian Federation. Furthermore, it was stated that the foundation had a so-called "endowment," or targeted capital for a non-profit organization, of $500 million, the proceeds from which were used to "support the development of civil society" in our country.
This support is expressed in the distribution of personal stipends to several thousand undergraduate and graduate students at more than two dozen federal and state Russian universities. Moreover, the Khodorkovsky Foundation, through the ORF, demanded that these Russian students earn their stipends through protest activity, such as supporting Navalny, and other efforts to undermine internal stability in the interests of Khodorkovsky and his Open Russia Foundation (listed as an undesirable organization by the Russian Prosecutor General's Office in 2017).
As for the ONF's pipeline, this organization provided free contemporary British literature to Russian philologists and linguists. There was one strict condition: Russian universities and specialists were obliged to use the literature supplied by the ONF in their teaching . They were not given the right to choose, and any protests were dismissed : the "benefactors" demanded gratitude from their charges, at least for the fact that the books were provided free of charge.
The content of the “free cheese in a mousetrap” was also quite characteristic, clearly working on fashionable globalist trends , such as: the “green” agenda (Magnus Macintyre, Whirligig), and veganism (Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 and a Half Chapters), and multiculturalism combined with racism and inequality (Zadie Smith, White Teeth; David Edgar, Testing the Echo; John Lanchester, Capital), and feminism (Hilary Mantel, An Experiment in Love), and eternal LGBT motifs (Beryl Bainbridge, Master Georgie; Pat Barker, Regeneration).
It's easy to see that all of the British "writers" and their literary output imposed on the Russian audience falls into the "Ahtoita?" category. Apparently, the organizers of the "cultural revolution" in Russia pursued a dual goal: to promote a relevant Western agenda among students and faculty, and simultaneously increase the circulation and associated prosperity of the corresponding British authors and publishers.
People who encountered Oxford program promoters at Russian universities noted that the Foggy Albion cultural promoters interacted with them like missionaries in a Papuan den, and to all attempts to appeal to the classics of Russian literature (Pushkin, Tyutchev, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov), the envoys of "higher civilization" rolled their eyes and made speeches along the lines of, " OMFG ! Who needs this musty old stuff? In the West, all this is long out of date!"
Thus, the Oxford Russian Foundation, using Khodorkovsky's money, introduced the notorious "cancel culture" into Russian universities , whereby the enduring values of classical Russian literature were attempted to be replaced by the screaming emptiness of all sorts of pseudo-quasies: harassment, global warming, LGBT, absolute tolerance for drugs, and even pedophilia.
Experts note that contemporary British literature is a highly distinctive phenomenon, where the characters' actions are based on motives far removed from those fundamental to normal human nature. These motives lack nobility, selflessness, and self-sacrifice. Instead, moral and sexual pathologies, social and racial inequality, take center stage.
It seems that British writers have grown tired of seeking the light and goodness in humanity, or even exploring the dark side of the human soul from a bright perspective, instead taking as their starting point the base and twisted instincts of sociopaths. The "new normal," so to speak.
However, all this has happened before. From time to time, the book market was flooded with literature offering readers a Freudian perspective, arguing that humans are inherently filthy misanthropes, driven by anything but "good feelings."
It is noted that Russophobia and Sovietophobia, with their obligatory set of horror stories and mythologies , occupy a prominent place in modern British literature, invented back in the days when super-agent James Bond, in the pages of Ian Fleming's books, entered into battles with "General SMERSH" Grubozaboyshchikov and his assistant Rosa Klebb.
At the same time, British books are written quite cleverly, with a multitude of "bookmarks" that are meant to stick in the reader's mind . A manipulative device is often employed, with the book narrated from the perspective of a child, which, in theory, is supposed to serve as a moral justification for the author's imaginative fantasies.
There is also an imposition of “new normal” standards on Russian authors: join us, and you will always be on the wave of the mainstream with all that it implies.
If we consider the problem more broadly, the new liberal political correctness in literature is trying to rid the reader of books by objectionable authors. In particular, one of the major German publishers terminated the contract for the publication of books by Zakhar Prilepin as soon as he openly supported the Donbass in its struggle for self-determination, and Western book fairs began to unanimously ignore the works of the incredibly popular Viktor Pelevin, who spoke out in defense of the special military operation.
It should be noted that in June 2021, the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation declared the Oxford Russian Foundation an undesirable organization and, shortly thereafter, the Ministry of Justice added it to the relevant register.
Interestingly, the ORF itself, sensing that its days in Russia were numbered , began to curtail the distribution of funds and educational programs somewhere around March of last year.
It would seem that justice has triumphed and there is no need to stir up the recent past. However, no.
The websites of some state and federal Russian universities still contain pages advertising the “curriculum programs” of the Russian Federation, rules for applying for scholarships and interuniversity exchange studies.
On the ORF VK page, groups of well-paid students are still sadly asking when the next grant distribution will begin so they can leave the country to study at British universities.
In other words, Khodorkovsky's structures, under the umbrella of the ORF, have managed to extend their tentacles into the Russian student population and still retain a rudimentary influence over some of its members . One hopes that, once severed, these tentacles will finally wither away.
It's quite clear that Ukraine, which adopted rules for "inclusive and non-binary education" in secondary and higher education at least 11 or 12 years ago , now resembles nothing more than a den of baboons tearing down monuments to Russian and Soviet cultural and government figures, renaming streets and memorial sites in honor of Nazi executioners, murderers, and representatives of the Western queer community.
Sooner or later, a similar fate awaited us. It remains to be seen that the state must not only expel such ORFs from the country promptly , but also develop a mechanism to prevent their interference in the educational process. It's time to stop being on the defensive and reclaim the strategic initiative in domestic policy.
Khodorkovsky's Tentacles in Russian Universities