Time & Perspective Quote by Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Khodorkovsky frames private property less as a trophy than as a burden you can finally be held responsible for. Coming from a post-Soviet businessman who rose fast, fell hard, and became a political symbol, the line reads like an argument against nostalgia: if you want the freedoms that markets promise, you also inherit the exhausting, unglamorous labor of self-management that collectivism once claimed to spare you.

The rhetorical trick is the repetition of "personally concerned" - a drumbeat that turns property into a moral technology. It is not just about owning things; it is about being forced into adulthood. In the Soviet imagination, the state was the parent and the citizen the dependent. Khodorkovsky flips that relationship: property rights create an obligation to plan, save, worry, and hustle. The subtext is pointed: many critiques of capitalism in transition - inequality, precarity, corruption - are real, but so is the temptation to outsource agency back to the state. He is insisting that agency is the point, even when it hurts.

"This is hard work" lands like a rebuke to both camps. To would-be oligarchs, it punctures the fantasy that wealth is pure privilege, detached from civic duty. To ordinary citizens burned by the 1990s shock therapy, it acknowledges the psychological tax of living without guarantees. In that double address, Khodorkovsky is selling a version of liberal citizenship: property as responsibility, not merely protection, and freedom as a demanding daily practice rather than a slogan.