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 downfalclass="underline"
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.
It is impossible to say precisely which of the arguments that was being advanced by Sechin through various people ended up being the decisive one for Putin to arrest me. Most likely he was dared to – or be exposed as a weakling.
The Consequences of Khodorkovsky
The arrest was the defining act. It imposed the Putin consensus on the oligarchs. The rival political patron was finished. It established once and for all that Putin would not tolerate open challenges to the executive. It made it clear that the presidency had powers akin to a tsar. It was Putin’s 1929, his 1988, his 1993. Within the government not everyone was pleased with this new turn. Kasyanov in particular continued to speak out against the arrest until January 2004. This was not appreciated:
At the next cabinet meeting, he [Putin] made us sit there for more than an hour while the prosecutor read out all the charges against Khodorkovsky, as if hearing them spoken proved their legitimacy. All the cabinet members sat there stone-faced, with no clue why it was being done. As for me, I couldn’t keep from cracking a smile now and then as I listened to the blatant absurdities and fabrications. And, of course, throughout Putin was closely watching the reaction of the cabinet members, and mine was the only one at variance. When it ended, of course, nobody had any questions or comments, and everybody walked out in silence.43
Out in western Siberia the arrests continued. To show that Khodorkovsky was never coming back, more than 370 Yukos workers were hauled before the police. Then the nationalizations began. This, according to Putin, is why: ‘I want to say once again that the state should manage only the property it needs to carry out its public functions, ensure state power and guarantee the country’s security and defence policy.’ Reality was cruder. When threatened by Berezovsky and Gusinsky, the President had grabbed what made them powerful – their assets. Now, he nationalized Khodorkovsky’s resources.
To the despair of men like Kasyanov, this remade Russia as an economy and a state. Putin allies started to ‘double-hat’ on the boards of big state companies. All talk of the privatization of the state oil giant Rosneft vanished. Within two years, the share of Russian GDP produced by private enterprise fell from 70 per cent to 65 per cent.44 Within four years the share of Russian oil production in private hands fell from 90 per cent to 45 per cent.45