Forbes' Most Powerful Person Writes His Enemies Out of History Textbooks

How do you get to be Forbes’ most powerful person? Write your enemies out of history:

Jailed former Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky and late oligarch Boris Berezovsky were among the names left out of the draft outline for new standardized Russian history textbooks to be taught in schools.

The unified textbooks, proposed by President Vladimir Putin in February, are expected to replace a diversity of alternative editions that are currently used in schools. Critics have argued that the proposal would lead to a single Kremlin-approved version of events similar to ideology-laden Soviet textbooks.

Anti-Kremlin tycoons Khodorkovsky and Berezovsky were expected by many to be mentioned in the section covering the post-Soviet period, but they failed to make the cut in the 80-page draft that will be submitted to Putin for approval Thursday, RIA Novosti reported Wednesday.

Though many opposition figures were not mentioned in the draft, it did include plenty of other people who were in the public eye between 1991 and 2012, such as sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, musician Yury Shevchuk, and Chechnya’s first president, Akhmat Kadyrov.

Zhirinovsky is an anti-Semitic, racist nut who thought Saddam ran a model country and wants to invade Alaska.

Khodorkovsky has been labeled a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International and writes against rising authoritarianism in Russia as the Kremlin finds new charges to keep him in the gulag. Last month, Khodorkovsky was awarded the prestigious 2013 Lech Walesa Award for “courage in promoting the values of civil society.”