Sunday, April 2, 2017

Comrade Capitalist

Yesterday, 1 April 2017, The Times of London published an article by Rachel Sylvester about Bill Browder (William Felix Browder), the grandson of the E. Browder (1891-1973), the General Secretary of Communist Party USA from 1930 to 1945. B. Browder allegedly rebelled against Communism in the family,

The grandson of Earl Browder, the former leader of the American Communist Party[*], he became a capitalist as an act of rebellion and spent more than a decade living as a businessman in Moscow, running Russia's most successful investment fund. He was deported in 2006 after he started to expose corruption, and was blacklisted by the Russian government as a "threat to national security". Since then he has been convicted in absentia on what he calls trumped-up charges and sentenced to nice years in jail.
This story is not credible. His success in Moscow was possible precisely because of the Communist heritage and the trust of the Russian leadership which he must have enjoyed. Capitalism here is only a facade.

Diagnosis: Bill Browder is not acting against Moscow's leadership, but with full support thereof.

Was the second name "Felix" given to him in reverence of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first chief of the Communist secret police, first Cheka, then GPU and OGPU, in post-1917 Soviet Russia?

[*] It is interesting that the article does not provide the correct name of the Party, which is the Communist Party USA.