Several days ago, the country’s bookshops received a book called ‘Introduction to the Future: The World in 2020’. (Sales in Moscow started a week ago.) It’s edited and prefaced by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and in it eight authors (famous economists and political analysts) attempt to look at ‘life at a turning-point’ in 2020, a date set by the its editor. According to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, 2020 is an especially important year since this is the time that marks the beginning of market reforms in Russia. ‘Thus we can imagine a potential range of changes’, writes Mikhail Khodorkovsky. ‘We define as far as possible the global framework within which Russia will have to operate (and in the formation of which we’ll ideally play a part), the framework necessary for making concrete, short-term and especially medium-term plans’. The editor points out that the experts involved in the project ‘represent quite a wide spectrum of opinion’. One of its authors, Mikhail Delyagin, moreover, describes his co-authors as people ‘who really think about the long-term prospects of the world and are ready to do so not only in political terms’. ‘This book’, Delyagin stresses, ‘is strictly apolitical. It’s technological and intellectual’. Editor Mikhail Khodorkhovsky is happy to admit that the collection has ‘no overall sense of painful catastrophe on the part of the Russian analytical community’. The book, to be precise, contains forecasts of humankind’s geopolitical future and estimates of the ways in which the world will have to cope with the deficit of raw materials and water that is already in evidence today. According to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, as we get closer to 2020 more and more importance will be given ‘not to engineering technologies but to technologies of governance integrating the exact sciences, medicine, group and individual psychology, mathematics and philosophy’. Most important for future and contemporary humanity, Mikhail Khopdorkovsky believes, is ‘the creation of a more equitable world order, allowing for improved living conditions and prospects for the majority’. Work on the collection took six months; and all the authors were told the editor’s name in advance. The original circulation of the book – 2000 copies. 383 pages. Publishing house, Algorhythm, 2007.