Copyright Washington Post Newsweek Interactive Co. May/Jun 2010
[Headnote]
AN OIL TYCOON IN A GLASS CAGE ASPIRES TO BE RUSSIA'S NEXT SAKHAROV.
HE HAS BEEN STABBED, SPIED ON, and sent to solitary confinement. His
oil company assets have been seized by the state, his fortune
decimated, his family fractured. And now, after nearly seven years in a
Siberian prison camp and a Moscow jail cell, he is back on trial in a
Russian courtroom, sitting inside a glass cage and waiting for a new
verdict that could keep him in the modern Gulag for much of the rest of
his life. Each day, he is on display as if in a museum exhibit, trapped
for all to see inside what his son bitterly calls "the freaking
aquarium."
Mikhail Khodorkovsky was once Russia's richest man, the most
powerful of the oligarchs who emerged in the post-Soviet rush of crony
capitalism, and the master of 2 percent of the world's oil production.
Now he is the most prominent prisoner in Vladimir Putin's Russia, a
symbol of the perils of challenging the Paloma Picasso Loving Heart Disc Pendant
and the author of a regular barrage of fiery epistles about the sorry
state of society from his cramped cell. In a country where the public
space is a political wasteland, his case and his letters from prison
evoke a different age.
"No doubt," he wrote us from inside the glass cage, "in modern
Russia any person who is not a politician but acts against the
government's policies and for ordinary, universally recognized human
rights is a dissident."
The idea of a dissident with overseas bank accounts and an army of
lawyers and publicists writing blogs and Twitter feeds on his behalf
from safe quarters in London and Washington seems paradoxical.
Certainly, it is a long way from the penurious imprisonment and exile
of the Soviet-era dissidents who embodied the term, the Andrei
Sakharovs and AJeksandr Solzhenitsyns who defied Communist power. Yet
in today's Russia, Putin and his fellow kgb veterans have broken the
opposition, marginalized the few survivors of Boris Yeltsin's epic if
flawed revolution, and ensured that no force in society is strong
enough to undermine their rule. The most today's reformers can muster
are small protests like the gathering last New Year's Eve resulting in
the arrest of an 82-year-old activist in a snow maiden costume. Open
defiance, then, is left to a robber baron with a murky past, a
billionaire dissident for a new era in a country that may have shed its
Soviet skin but not its autocratic skeleton.
From his glass cage, Khodorkovsky needles the regime every chance he
gets, and it has so far proved powerless to stop his pronouncements,
smuggled regularly to Russian newspapers, literary figures, and an
array of international media. In March, on the one-year anniversary of
his latest trial, he called the securiryservices-dominated "conveyor
belt" substituting for a justice system "the gravedigger of modern
Russian statehood" and prophesied darkly that "its destruction will
occur in the traditional way for Russia, from below and with
bloodshed." His frequent writings even earned him a literary prize this
year for his correspondence with famed Russian writer Lyudmila
Ulitskaya. His financial battle against the Kremlin is being waged in
European courts to the fury of Putin's advisors, and his imprisonment
is a regular irritant in Russian-American relations. U.S. President
Barack Obama raised it before visiting Moscow last year, and the State
Department's human rights report in March cited Khodorkovsky among the
six Russian political prisoners it identified by name. "The arrest,
conviction, and subsequent treatment of Khodorkovskiy," the report
said, "raised concerns about due Tiffany 1837 Interlocking circles necklace and the rule of law."
But for all that, Khodorkovsky's voice is largely ignored in Russia
today. The media, controlled or intimidated by authorities, give him
little attention. The political parties he once funded have been
effectively evicted from national politics. Many Russians agree with
Putin, who last November compared Khodorkovsky with the mobster Al
Capone, suggesting he too was responsible for murders bur had to be
tried for financial crimes.
When we visited Khodorkovsky's trial, the one-time titan of Russian
capitalism was escorted in handcuffs each morning by Kalashnikov-toting
guards. The glass cage was an upgrade from his first trial, when like
other Russian defendants, he sat in an actual cage with metal bars. As
soon as the glass door closed each morning, Khodorkovsky would search
for familiar faces. There were not many. His wife rarely comes. His
business partners have fled the country. Only a handful of people not
paid to be there bother to show up.
Little wonder. While the Kremlin mulls what to do with Khodorkovsky,
the prosecutor was spending each day reading monotonously from 186
binders of oil contracts, accounting forms, and other documents, making
no attempt to explain their relevance to the charges that Khodorkovsky
led an organized criminal group that embezzled nearly 350 million tons
of oil from 1998 to 2003 - essentially the entire production of his
Yukos Oil Company - and laundered more than $24 billion of the
proceeds. Even fellow prosecutors could not stifle yawns and the
judge's eyes glazed over, as Khodorkovsky dutifully examined his
copies, marking them with a green highlighter. The only break in the
tedium came one day when Khodorkovsky complained to the judge that a
guard was blocking his view.
This is what his life has come to, begging for a better vantage of
his show trial. "My own fate," he wrote us one day from his glass cage,
"has become a reflection of the fate of my country. That has already
happened in our history before. Today, when we read Solzhenksyn,
fVarlam] Shalamov, Aleksei Tolstoy, we understand from their heroes'
fates the history of our country better than from dry chronologies in
school textbooks. Maybe my life will also help to understand today's
Russia better - it will become a symbol of changes."
If Khodorkovsky is right and his experience has become in a small
way that of Russia's flailing democracy, then it is a story of flawed
protagonists, hidden agendas, and dashed ideals.
"It's literature, absolutely," said Grigory Chkhartishvili, who,
under the pseudonym Boris Akunin, is one of Russia's most successful
living novelists. Although they have never met, Chkhartishvili struck
up a correspondence with Khodorkovsky, seeing his case as a tale of
power, money, and intrigue that puts a society on trial as much as a
man. He calls it a Dreyfus Affair for Russia. "IfTd written a novel
like that," he told us, "nobody would have believed it."
KHODORKOVSKY is 46, but he now looks much older, a short, gaunt man
with graying stubble where hair used to be. The man in the glass cage
is no longer the commanding figure we knew in Moscow as bureau chiefs
for the Washington Post at the beginning of the Putin era. Those were
the years when Putin was Airplane charm pendant
his campaign to consolidate power, taking over independent television,
driving opposition parties out of parliament, eliminating the election
of governors, and forcing oligarchs who defied him to flee the country.
Khodorkovsky was the one who refused to go.
The son of chemical engineers, he grew up as part of the old system,
a leader of Komsomol, the Communist Party's youth league, with
aspirations to run a factory. His father, Boris, was an admirer of
Stalin ("Later, it turned out he was such a son of a bitch," Boris told
us ruefully), and though his mother, Marina, was skeptical, she did not
disabuse her son. "He was a believer," she told us. "He had Lenin's
portrait and a red flag above his desk." It was not until much later
that he saw things differently. Khodorkovsky told Ulitskaya that
reading Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich changed
his life. "I was shaken," he wrote, "I despised Stalin as having
tarnished the party's cause in the interest of the cult of his own
personality."
If he was a product of the system, young Misha nonetheless had a
rebellious streak growing up in Moscow. Family and friends are full of
stories of clashes with authority figures. "He constantly argued with
us," Boris remembered. "I wanted to beat him up so much. But you can't
do that with children." Nadezhda Zlobina, a friend since third grade,
recalled Misha standing up to a chemistry teacher and taking over the
class. "He was never afraid of arguing with teachers," she told us. "So
he said something to Putin - it didn't surprise me because he was never
afraid of speaking up."
Yet Khodorkovsky was no Solzhenitsyn. He may have been headstrong,
but what he cared about most was acquiring money and power. With the
advent of perestroïka, he experimented with get-rich-quick schemes. In
1988, he started his own bank, Menatep, and became a conduit of
government money to state enterprises, pocketing huge profits by
holding dollars in an era of massive ruble inflation. By age 30, he was
buying state assets through manipulated auctions. He acquired control
of Yukos, then the country's second-largest oil producer, for a paltry
$309 million in a 1995 auction run, conveniently enough, by his own
Menatep bank.
He made plenty of enemies, forcing foreign creditors to write off
debt by threatening to take them to Russia's corrupt courts and
cheating investors by issuing new shares to dilute their stock. "In the
early years, he was playing games," said Sarah Carey, an American
attorney who later served on the I Yukos board. "I don't think they
were illegal, most of them, because the laws were so incomplete."
But by 2001, Khodorkovsky dreamed of playing on the international
stage and declared himself to be cleaning up his act. He plowed some
profits back into the company, improved technology, recruited Western
executives, and adopted Western accounting practices, doubling the
company's output and transforming it into Russia's largest oil producer
on the verge of a $45 billion merger. "He was doing a firstrate job,"
Carey said. "The company wasn't perfect, but no company was. They were
openly and energetically moving in the right direction."
Khodorkovsky was also becoming a bigger force in Russian society,
promoting Western-style democracy and the rule of law. He formed a
charity called Open Russia and doled out tens of millions of dollars to
human rights groups, foundations, and Atlas charm bracelet
parties critical of the Kremlin; he also assiduously cultivated
contacts in Washington and other Western capitals while negotiating
with international oil giants about possible mergers. He reasoned he
was living three generations of Rockefellers in one life - from robber
baron to pillar of business to philanthropist. We went to see him in
his wood-paneled Moscow office during this makeover and asked if it was
about rehabilitating his image. No, he said. "This is more for the
soul."
Perhaps, but Khodorkovsky's soul was competing with his ego. When
Putin came to office, he told the oligarchs they could keep gains from
the shady 1990s as long as they did not challenge his rule.
Khodorkovsky did not listen. He aspired to control much of parliament,
and some allies were even told he harbored ambitions to become prime
minister, though he denies that. In a new memoir, Lord John Browne, the
former chief executive of BP, recalled listening to Khodorkovsky boast
of his influence over parliament and being struck by the hubris. Then
he recalled Putin telling him, "I have eaten more dirt than I need to
from that man." At a climactic Kremlin meeting, Khodorkovsky lectured
Putin about corruption in a state privatization deal. "Putin just
exploded," a top advisor told us. Five months later, Khodorkovsky's
business partner, Piaron Lebedev, was arrested, ano Khodorkovsky was
warned to leave the country. He refused. "The West accepted him," said
Aleksei Kondaurov, a former top Yukos executive. "So I think all that
made him overestimate his security."
In October 2003, armed, masked agents of the FSB, the KGB's
successor, stormed onto Khodorkovsky's private plane on the tarmac in
Novosibirsk and arrested him. He was eventually sentenced to eight
years in prison for fraud and tax evasion, and the state seized much of
Yukos in what even Putin's economic advisor called "the scam of the
year."
PRISON HAS LONG HELD A NEAR-MYTHIC place in the Russian psyche, with
Siberia a cleansing way station where aristocrats plotted revolutions
and nuclear physicists turned into peace activists. Khodorkovsky claims
that legacy now. "Prison," he told Grigory Chkhartishvili, the
novelist, "makes a person free."
In his first 40 years, Khodorkovsky had been many things - a hustler
and a banker, an oilman and a philanthropist - but never a political
thinker or writer. Putin has turned Khodorkovsky into both. His most
famous polemic, published during his first year behind bars, surprised
everyone by denouncing the liberals who had run Russia in the 1990s -
and whom he had supported with millions of dollars. They were
"dishonest or inconsistent," "effete bohemians" who "cheated 90 percent
of the population" and "turned a blind eye" to the corruption of
privatization. They should feel "a sense of shame." As for himself and
his fellow oligarchs, "We were accomplices in their misdeeds and lies."
If this seemed a prison conversion, Khodorkovsky continued to turn
heads with a series of further statements known as his "Left Turn"
essays, arguing that Russia should turn away from the policies of the
democrats and accommodate the grievances of old Communists by restoring
welfare programs and addressing complaints about privatization. "A
leftward turn," he wrote, "is as necessary as it is inevitable to the
fate of Russia."
