Yukos executives began to be arrested. In the weeks leading up to Khodorkovsky’s arrest two of the richest oligarchs, Mikhail Friedman and Mikhail Potanin, told him to stop. They warned him he was endangering himself, endangering them and the whole country. He didn’t. So why did Khodorkovsky feel so secure? Berezovsky and Gusinsky were already in exile. Putin had already clamped down on TV. The regime had shown that it reacted to threats by tightening the screws.
Inside the government itself the challenge mounted by Khodorkovsky was causing rifts and strain: many at the very top were opposed to the drastic measures being planned against him, including the prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov. He had sensed a change in his relationship with Putin for months. ‘The breakdown of our agreement [to divide power] came in 2003. At first the pressure began on business, then the plot to take Yukos took shape with increased pressure being placed on the oil industry as a whole.’
Khodorkovsky thought he was better than Berezovsky or Gusinsky. He thought he had better intelligence. Those close to him say that, at the time, Khodorkovsky felt he was safe as he had sources at the very heart of the Kremlin. These sources had been reliable up to this point. His family and his advisors claim this was none other than Alexander Voloshin, Putin’s chief of staff, the same man who had told Berezovsky not to worry that they had ‘let the black colonels in’.
Khodorkovsky’s son Pavel blames Voloshin for intrigues that led to his father’s arrest: ‘Voloshin was trying to use my father in an internal Kremlin power struggle.’ He claims that Voloshin had suggested Khodorkovsky present the infamous slides on Russian corruption to Putin. ‘I have from several sources,’ insists Pavel, ‘that Voloshin now feels remorse. He did not intend it to lead to an arrest.’
Khodorkovsky was better than other oligarchs. He had a wife and unlike the others was not a shameless womanizer. For fun he did not fly a plane load of women to ‘party’ in a ski chalet, but took all his children to Paris, to walk them round the Louvre, stopping to explain what each artefact was. This makes hearing Pavel talk about ‘my father’ unsettling. What was about to happen was not only a man’s political catastrophe but a personal one.
In public the oligarch was refusing to show fear, but in private his sense of tomorrow had darkened. In 2003 Khodorkovsky went on what would be his last visit to the United States to show his American colours. This was the year US forces stormed into Baghdad. He visited his son Pavel at Babson College, where he was studying. Pavel remembers; ‘My father said to me, “The final thing they will do now is arrest me.” He seemed to know this was coming.’
Yet Khodorkovsky still had time to flee the country, as Berezovsky had done. Why he did not do this is a question he has never fully answered. In his letters from prison he alludes to himself as a martyr, that he chose to be arrested, that he had resisted temptation and been purified by prison.
I could have foreseen things. When I understood things, it was already too late. I had the choice of going onto my knees or going to jail. And maybe I could have gone onto my knees. The temptation was very great.39
Was he trying to be a martyr? Or is this the self-valediction of an imprisoned egomaniac who cannot admit he made a mistake? To many it seemed he had developed an almost messianic complex. His writings from jail brimmed with biblical references and insinuations that he had been reborn:
Yes, that sweet word ‘freedom’ has many meanings. But its spirit cannot be eradicated nor extirpated. It is the spirit of the titan Prometheus who presented man with fire. It is the spirit of Jesus Christ who spoke as the one who was right and not like the scribes and Pharisees. Hence, the reason for the crisis of Russian liberalism lies not in the ideals of freedom, albeit perceived differently by everyone. This is not about the system, but people, as the last Soviet prime minister Valentin Pavlov used to say. Those who were entrusted by fate and history to guard the liberal values in our country have failed in their task. Today we must sincerely admit that, because the times of slyness are over, and to me, here in a dungeon of remand centre No. 4 this is, perhaps, a bit more obvious than to those in more comfortable conditions.40
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 fundamentaclass="underline"
‘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.