Ben Judah - Fragile Empire - How Russia Fell in and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin

Those working closely with the oligarch do not believe he intended to be a martyr. This sense of self was to come later. According to his then spokesman Krause:

‘I think that he misjudged. He knew that he would be arrested and he had been told by sources he thought were very reliable in the Kremlin that he would be arrested for two to three days, but then he would be let out on bail. So then, at that point, he could decide whether or not he wanted to stay and fight or quietly leave. At that point I think he misjudged. He thought he was more powerful than he was. He had what he thought were very reliable sources. The question is whether or not those sources were misled or deliberately misleading Khodorkovsky.’

Voloshin resigned with the news of the arrest. But the whole Khodorkovsky story is not just a story of intrigue, nor is it a morality play. It is a story about Russian power, and like all Russian political stories – it is about PR. What made Khodorkovsky different from the other oligarchs is that he had invested hugely into his image, especially in the United States. This meant that his arrest would strain relations between Russia and the West, unlike the Gusinsky and Berezovsky affairs, which were ignored in Brussels and Washington. As his former spokesman, Krause identifies his work at the PR firm that Yukos hired, as fundamental:

‘The work that we did with him at APCO is also a very important part of the story. Had someone not started working with him in the early 2000s and managed to really communicate to people in the West that he was really trying to change his game, his arrest would have been viewed as a long overdue act by the government to go after crooks. He had a very good trip to the United States right before his arrest. So much so that the President’s wife Barbara Bush asked me about this case.’

I made contact in summer 2012 with some of Khodorkovsky’s ‘people’ in London. They agreed to ask his lawyers to carry a letter from me to his prison colony. When I sat down to write it I felt odd, like I was writing to a ghost, even a myth. The question that dogged me most of all was this: Did the tycoon understand he was risking so many years in jail, not merely a few nights in a fetid cell like Gusinsky had experienced back in 2000? For months – nothing. Then I received a call. ‘He’s written back.’ Touching on the question that was gnawing at me, Khodorkovsky had given me half an answer:

I had been told already at the beginning of 2003 that Putin had willed they give me eight years. Although at first I did not believe them.

The night before his arrest the oligarch was flying on a private jet across Russia, visiting politicians and inspecting fields. Officially it was to ‘promote the company in the regions’. But why would a Russian oil company need to ‘promote the company in the regions’, by delivering political speeches at universities and meeting local governors? Those whose parties he was funding knew this was simple cover.

Boris Nemtsov says unofficially that the head of Yukos wanted to speak to local leaders about their political frustrations and drum up support amongst students. In the Kremlin, that bureaucrat on a throne, that ‘chinovnik’, had already given the order, the order most thought he would never dare give; for what would the West do if he gave that order?

The night before Putin’s men came, Khodorkovsky’s plane had been delayed in taking off for his destination in Siberia. He had half-jokingly asked the pilot if they had enough fuel to reach Finland. The following morning, they came for him on his jet. ‘Nobody move.’ They had ‘FSB’ stitched on their tundra uniforms and they were all heavily armed. In Moscow, his wife had been dreaming she was lost in a collapsing city. ‘Put your guns down.’ In his letter, Khodorkovsky recalls his emotions the moment the FSB barged in:

When armed people entered into the airplane, if anything I felt a sense of calm. At last the energy-sapping waiting was over and certainty had appeared.

In Siberia, the richest man in Russia was thrown into an unheated cell, then forced into a black canvas hood and marched in handcuffs onto a military aircraft. In that first week inside the prison system, his first cellmates remember him lying in his cot, shocked, refusing food. ‘He seemed to be thinking very hard about something.’ 41

It was already over. There is no rule of law in such political cases; here the law does not really exist until it is made a weapon. In Moscow, the stock exchange was forced to close for an hour to stabilize trading. In newsrooms and in political circles there was also shock. The only ones who did not really understand were his youngest children, twin boys.

Prime Minister Kasyanov spoke out against it. No one, not even he, had quite believed until the last minute that Putin was capable of such an outrageous, ruthless, assertion of power. But he was. The show trial started within months. The once mighty oligarch was soon sitting in a cage waiting to be tried. No longer in shock – he seemed composed, even elegant behind bars. Khodorkovsky wrote to me about his feelings in that cage:

The formal arrest took place later, in the [Moscow] Basmanny Court, where I first looked into the craven roguish eyes of a bureaucrat in the robes of a judge.

Khodorkovsky writes that as he smiled, crossing his arms in relaxed defiance, looking straight into the cameras and the flash photography of all Russia:

I was only thinking about my close ones. I was looking at my mother, at my wife; I was endeavouring to catch their gaze and to hold it, to convey my composure. It seemed to me this was important to them.

For the other tycoons, this was terrifying political theatre. TV repeatedly replayed this image of the powerless Khodorkovsky to impress upon his fellow billionaires who was the power in Russia. The day after he was arrested, the seven richest men in Russia flew out of Moscow. Inside the government those such as Kasyanov were in despair:

Frankly, I felt after the arrest… along with my colleagues in the government, a diminished enthusiasm for reform [from Putin]. All took it as a signal that the liberal reforms will be phased out. Kudrin, Gref, other ministers were in a gloomy mood, they were morally depressed. 42

Putin allegedly refused to answer Kasyanov’s demands for an explanation. Even the prime minister did not understand. Why did Khodorkovsky have to be arrested?

I asked Putin three times to tell me what was the reason for the arrest of Khodorkovsky. When he finally told me he said that he had been financing parties in the Duma that he had not permitted him to do – in particular the Communist Party. That was what Putin said was the reason for the arrest. The logical deduction you could make was that Putin was frightened of Khodorkovsky.

Many in Moscow believed that this fear was being stoked in Putin by someone. Inside the Kremlin, there were cunning tacticians, trying to turn Khodorkovsky’s power play into their own – and fingers pointed at Igor Sechin, the deputy chief of staff. This was an old friend Putin trusted. He had hired Sechin to work for him in St Petersburg in 1991. Through the years Sechin had prospered by controlling access to ‘the Boss’, even drawing up morning ‘reports’ to be read by Putin first thing. Khodorkovsky wrote in his letter to me that he thinks Sechin brought about his downfall:

Nobody in our country has any doubt that ‘approval’ for my arrest was received personally from Vladimir Putin… But the initiator of everything that happened – and today this can be said with a high degree of certainty – was Mr Sechin, who knows his ‘patron’ very well indeed, and was able to successfully manipulate him and a significant part of his retinue. I was shown, as the most dangerous political adversary, and into the bargain as representing the interests of Americans […] the conspiracy-theory mentality easily accepted the idea of a large-scale conspiracy, taking into account facts of financial assistance to opposition parties; the activity of the Open Russia foundation; once again, the problem of the need to get away from a super-presidential model of the regime to a parliamentary one, something I had been discussing widely; the call to reject systemic corruption, which has today become one of the foundations of the regime; and so on.