If someone had told me a year ago that the Union of Right Forces and Yabloko would fail to clear the five percent barrier in the State Duma elections, I would have had serious doubts about his competence as a political analyst and forecaster. Today the collapse of both parties is a reality.

Officially, two liberal candidates contested the presidential election. The first, the former Communist and Agrarian Ivan Rybkin, ran nothing remotely resembling a political campaign. Instead he delivered the kind of cheap farce that even Oleg Malyshkin, presidential candidate from the Liberal Democratic Party and Vladimir Zhirinovsky's personal bodyguard, would have been ashamed of. The second liberal candidate, Irina Khakamada, did all she could to distance herself from her own liberal past, criticizing Boris Yeltsin and insisting on the social orientation of the state. And then without a hint of embarrassment (and perhaps not without justification) she touted her 3.84 percent share of the vote as a major success.

After my friend and business partner Platon Lebedev was arrested last summer, many politicians and experts held forth about the trampling of the law, civil rights and the threat of authoritarianism. These same people now compete to see who can offer the most saccharine compliments to officials in the Kremlin. No trace remains of the old rebellious liberal gloss. There are exceptions, of course, but they only prove the rule.

In essence, we are witnessing nothing less than the liberals' capitulation. This capitulation is not merely the liberals' fault, of course, but also their misfortune. Their fear before a thousand years of history has been spiced up by the powerful taste for creature comforts acquired in the 1990s; their servility is built in at the genetic level, as is their readiness to forget all about the Constitution in exchange for another serving of sturgeon and horseradish. Russian liberals were ever thus, and thus they remain.

The phrases "freedom of speech," "freedom of thought" and "freedom of conscience" are rapidly turning into empty clichÎs. Not just the general public, but the majority of the people we normally consider members of the elite, wearily dismiss them -- as if to say, "We get it. Another conflict between the oligarchs and the president. A plague on both your houses for leaving us to rot."

No one really knows or cares what has happened to the Union of Right Forces and Yabloko since their fiasco last December. Committee 2008, which presumed to become the conscience of Russian liberalism, readily admits its own impotence. "Look," the committee says, almost apologetically, "there aren't many of us and this isn't the right time, so we can't make any promises, but all the same ..." Khakamada's idea of forming the Free Russia party from the remains of Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces generated little interest apart from the bluster of a few dozen professional "party builders" who caught whiff of some more easy money.

At the same time, the bearers of a new discourse -- the ideology of the so-called "party of national revanchism" -- have sprouted in abundance on Russia's political soil. This "party" encompasses faceless, drab United Russia, and Rodina, all shiny with superiority over its less fortunate rivals, and the Liberal Democrats, whose leader has once more demonstrated his exceptional gift for political survival. All these people speak of the collapse of liberal ideas in Russia, though their words are usually insincere and uttered on command. They say that our country simply has no need for freedom. Freedom, they maintain, is extraneous to the goal of national development. Anyone who speaks about freedom is, in their view, either an oligarch or a bastard, which amounts to much the same thing.

In this context, President Vladimir Putin looks like liberal number one. From the point of view of national revanchism, he is eminently preferable to Zhirinovsky and Dmitry Rogozin. When you get right down to it, Putin is probably neither a liberal nor a democrat, but he is still more liberal and democratic than 70 percent of the Russian population. And it was Putin, after all, who absorbed the anti-liberal energy of the majority, bridled our national demons and prevented Zhirinovsky and Rogozin from seizing power in Russia. Well, not so much them -- they're just gifted political players, after all -- as the many supporters of their public pronouncements. Anatoly Chubais and Grigory Yavlinsky were by definition incapable of opposing "national revanchism." The best they could do is wait around for the advocates of values such as "Russia for the Russians" to boot them out of the country, as has unfortunately happened before in our history.

It's all true. But liberalism in Russia cannot die all the same because the hunger for freedom will always be one of man's basic instincts -- be he Russian, Chinese or Lapp. Yes, the sweet word freedom means many things, but its spirit is indestructible and ineradicable: It is the spirit of the titan Prometheus who gave fire to mankind; it is the spirit of Jesus Christ who spoke rightfully, not like the scribes and Pharisees.

The cause of the crisis of Russian liberalism, therefore, lies not in the ideal of freedom, even in our own particular understanding of it. As the last prime minister of the Soviet Union, Valentin Pavlov, said, it's the people that matter, not the system. Those into whose hands fate and history entrusted the preservation of liberal values in our country were not up to the task.

We must face up to this fact openly because the time for deception is past. Perhaps this is a little more obvious from my cell at Pre-Trial Detention Facility No. 4 than it is from more comfortable surroundings.

The Union of Right Forces and Yabloko lost the election not because the Kremlin discriminated against them, but because for the first time the presidential administration chose not to help them out and treated them no differently from the rest of the opposition. And Irina Khakamada achieved her outstanding result of 3.84 percent not in spite of the administration's powerful machine, which paid no attention to her, but in large part thanks to the Kremlin's keen interest in increasing voter turnout.

Big business abandoned the field not because of the sudden flourishing of corruption in Russia, but because the standard lobbying mechanisms ceased to work. They were designed with a weak president and the previous Kremlin administration in mind. That's all.

Socially active people with liberal views, among whose ranks I count myself for my sins, were responsible for making sure that Russia did not veer from the path of freedom. To paraphrase the famous words that Stalin spoke at the end of June 1941: We screwed up.

Now we must analyze our tragic mistakes and admit our guilt, both moral and historical. This is the only way we will find a way out of our current predicament.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former CEO of Yukos and its largest shareholder, is currently in detention awaiting trial. The full version of this comment first appeared in Monday's edition of Vedomosti; the second part of the comment will appear in Thursday's edition of The Moscow Times

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The Moscow Times, March 31, 2004