Those of us opposed to the Atlantic Yards project were alarmed by the news this week that Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov was to acquire a majority stake in the New Jersey Nets — as well as the responsibility for moving the team to Brooklyn and pushing through Bruce Ratner’s benighted attempt to give us a score of skyscrapers we never asked for. Bad enough that members of the loyal opposition such as Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn have always seen this as a David v. Goliath contest. Now we have an actual Goliath: the 6’7″ Prokhorov has designs on American basketball and about $10 billion to play with. 

In other parts of the country people paid less attention to this story; the big takeaway nationallywas “Russian guy buys US team.” This might have produced yowls of protest in the Cold War days, but when the Chinese own most of our debt and our baseball players are all Dominican, foreign influence seems relative.

Fortunately, the New York Times helpfully explains it all for us in a typically condescending editorial in today’s Week in Review. Moscow correspondent Clifford Levy first gives DDDB (of which I am a proud member) points for being “resourceful, tenacious and just plain ornery.” (“Get off my land, ya varmint!”) Then he establishes his bona fides by saying he now lives just blocks from Prokhorov’s office but used to live right near the site of the Nets proposed arena. 

That’s just to show he’s not biased as he lampoons “denizens of Brownstone Brooklyn” who “like to pad around in plastic clogs.” It is Mr. Levy’s unoriginal thesis that our once mighty borough — “land of Walt Whitman and other luminaries” —  could get some class back with an NBA arena. The development would, in his words, “accentuate its renaissance.”

I wish he still lived here; I would supply him with a map of the stars’ homes that he somehow missed when he lived here. Within a ten-minute walk of his old digs he could drop in on such modern luminaries as Jhumpa Lahiri, Jeffrey Wright, David Salle, Michelle Williams, Jennifer Egan and many more — nearly all of them opposed to this project. But Levy has already bagged his prey; he mocks a Park Slope public forum he attended in 2000 that debated the merits of Bush v. Nader, “as if the idea of even considering voting for George W. Bush was preposterous.” What were we thinking?!

Still, Levy thinks Prokhorov might have a hard time adapting to the idea of community resistance. He quotes Alec Brook-Krasny, a former Muscovite who now represents Brighton Beach in the state assembly on the difference between the two cultures. “Things are still done in a very simple way in Moscow,” he says. “Whoever is the main person in the neighborhood, the main official in the city, that person makes the decision. In 99 percent of the cases, it’s the final decision, and the community has no say.”

Crazy! Here we let three people — usually the mayor, the governor and whoever is running the legislature at the moment — make the decisions. And the community has no say here, either. This project was never put to a vote, the public hearings have been free-for-alls in which unions and others who stand to benefit financially have shouted down the opposition, and the city and the state have bent over backwards to make sure Ratner gets his way. Because here, as in Moscow, the guy with the most money wins. 

Sometimes with an assist from a journalist.