Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

At the age of thirty-seven, one of Russia’s richest men discovered the concept of social responsibility. In fact, he probably felt he invented it. It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless. So Khodorkovsky resolved to build civil society in Russia. “Until that point,” he wrote, “I saw business as a game. It was a game in which you wanted to win but losing was also an option. It was a game in which hundreds of thousands of people came to work in the morning to play with me. And in the evening they would go back to their own lives, which had nothing to do with me.” It was a hugely ambitious goal—but, for one of the handful of men who felt they had created a market economy from scratch, not an absurdly ambitious one.

Khodorkovsky formed a foundation and called it Otkrytaya Rossiya, Open Russia. He funded Internet cafés in the provinces, to get people to learn and to talk to one another. He funded training for journalists all over the country, and he sponsored the most talented television journalists to come study in Moscow for a month. He founded a boarding school for disadvantaged children; following the tragedy in Beslan, several dozen survivors became students there. Before long, he was stepping in where Western foundations and governments were pulling out; Russia was considered a stable democracy now, after all. Some said he was funding more than half of all the nongovernmental organizations in Russia; some said he was funding 80 percent of them. In 2003, Yukos pledged to give $100 million over ten years to the Russian State University for the Humanities, the best liberal arts school in the country—the first time a private company in Russia had contributed a significant amount of money to an educational institution.

Khodorkovsky also became preoccupied with the idea of transforming his company into a properly managed, transparently governed corporation. He hired McKinsey & Company, the global management consulting giant, to reform the management structure, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, another world giant, to create the accounting structure from scratch. “Before Pricewaterhouse came along, all the Yukos accountants knew how to do was stomp their feet and steal a bit at a time,” Khodorkovsky’s former tax lawyer told me. “They had to be taught everything.” His partners grumbled—Khodorkovsky’s efforts seemed to be misplaced—but he was determined to turn Yukos into the first Russian multinational corporation. To this end, he hired a Washington, D.C.–based public relations firm. “We would set up five interviews in New York, and we would spend the day going from interview to interview,” the consultant who worked with him remembered. “Not many CEOs would spend this kind of time. We got a Fortune cover story. He was a poster boy for what people hoped would happen in Russia.” The capitalization of Yukos grew exponentially, owing only in part to the growing price of oil, in part to newly modernized drilling and refining systems, which drastically reduced the cost of production, and in part to the new transparency. Khodorkovsky was the richest man in Russia, clearly on his way to becoming the richest man in the world.

On July 2, 2003, Platon Lebedev, the chairman of the board of Yukos’s parent company, Group Menatep, was arrested. Several weeks later, Yukos’s head of security, a former KGB officer, was behind bars. Khodorkovsky himself was told by those in the know and those who could simply follow the obvious logic of events that he, too, would be arrested soon. Someone even wrote up a prescription for Khodorkovsky of things to do to avoid arrest; the document, commissioned by one of his public-relations people, was never seen by Khodorkovsky because another of his publicity men ripped it up in outrage. In any case, it was obvious what Khodorkovsky should do: leave the country. His partner and coauthor with him of Man with a Ruble , Leonid Nevzlin, did just that: he moved to Israel. Khodorkovsky went to the United States briefly but returned—and went on tour.

There was a talk Khodorkovsky had been giving for a bit over a year at this point. I had heard it once when he addressed a group of young writers, assembled at his request. The point of the speech was that Russia should join the modern world: stop running its companies like medieval fiefdoms at best and prisons at worst; transform its economy into one based on the export of knowledge and expertise rather than oil and gas; value its smart, educated people—like us writers—and pay them well. Khodorkovsky was not a great public speaker: he tended to be stiff, and his voice was soft and incongruously high for a man of his height, his looks, and his wealth. But he had the force of conviction and the weight of his reputation on his side; people generally wanted to know what he wanted to say to them.

So instead of leaving the country or genuflecting before Putin—for this was precisely the advice the ripped-up paper had contained—Khodorkovsky decided to create his own lecture circuit. He hired Marina Litvinovich, Putin’s former image-maker, to coach him on public speaking. She told him he had a way of belaboring an idea even after the audience had come over to his side, and this caused him to lose his tempo. Khodorkovsky, a few assistants, and eight bodyguards commenced several months of living out of a chartered jet. He went around the country speaking to students, workers, even military recruits on one occasion (though that engagement seems to have been an organizers’ error). Litvinovich sat in the front row with a letter-size piece of paper with the word “Tempo” written on it; whenever Russia’s richest man perseverated, she held up the sign for him to see.

Over the weekend of October 18, 2003, the Khodorkovsky team was in Saratov, a city on the Volga River. It snowed and, unusual for that time of year, the snow stayed on the ground. For some reason no one quite understood or at least no one articulated, the entire group went outside and wandered in the vast white expanse. They then returned to their hotel, Khodorkovsky abruptly bade everyone good night and disappeared, and the rest of the group got quickly and morbidly drunk. The next morning Khodorkovsky told Litvinovich to return to Moscow: she had not seen her three-year-old son in weeks, and Khodorkovsky could manage the next destination without her.

The phone calls came in the dark predawn hours of October 25: Khodorkovsky had been arrested at the Novosibirsk airport at eight in the morning, five in Moscow. So that’s why he sent me home, thought Litvinovich. Anton Drel, Khodorkovsky’s personal lawyer, got a cryptic message through a third party: “Mr. Khodorkovsky requested that you be informed that he has been arrested. He said you would know what to do.” Typical Khodorkovsky, thought Drel, who had no idea what to do. In the late morning, he received another phone call: “This is Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Would it be convenient for you to come to the prosecutor general’s office now?” he asked with trademark formality; he had already been transported to Moscow. Several hours later, Khodorkovsky was indicted on six charges, including fraud and tax evasion.

EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER, Khodorkovsky would be found guilty not on six but on seven counts and sentenced to nine years in a prison colony. Long before that sentence was up, he would be indicted on a new set of charges and then sentenced again, this time to fourteen years behind bars. Lebedev, the former chairman of his board, would stand trial alongside Khodorkovsky both times. Other Yukos affiliates, including the former head of security, lawyers, and a variety of managers not only at Yukos but at several subsidiaries, would face other charges and similarly harsh sentences; dozens of others would flee the country. Eventually, even Amnesty International, openly reluctant at first to take on the case of a billionaire, would declare Khodorkovsky and Lebedev prisoners of conscience. No one—not even his jailers, it seemed—would doubt, after a certain point, that he was unfairly imprisoned, but even eight years after his arrest no one would be quite certain what exactly Khodorkovsky had done that had cost him his freedom and his fortune.