In his new book The Russia Conundrum, Mikhail Khodorkovsky looks at his life as an oil tycoon who became Russia’s most infamous political prisoner and envisions a brighter future for the country in the post-Putin era.ISABEL INFANTES/AFP/Getty Images
Mikhail Khodorkovsky lives in an uncertain world, especially in relation to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“I am one of his most prominent personal enemies, having me killed would be a very obvious and public gesture on his part,” the 59-year-old Moscow businessman and outspoken Kremlin critic says in The Russia Conundrum. Released this fall, the book looks at his life as an oil tycoon who subsequently became Russia’s most infamous political prisoner. It then envisions a brighter future for the country in the post-Putin era.
Mr. Khodorkovsky’s story begins in post-Soviet Russia, in the mid-1990s, when he was serving as deputy fuel and energy minister in Boris Yeltsin’s Reform Cabinet. He left the Kremlin soon afterward and became Russia’s wealthiest individual, heading up Yukos. The oil production company was worth nearly $30-billion in the early 2000s. Then Putin’s mafia state stole it.
The Kremlin ensured Yukos went insolvent and later absorbed the company’s assets for a knock-down price through their flagship oil producer, Rosneft. In 2005, Khodorkovsky was found guilty in a Russian court of tax evasion, corruption, embezzlement and money laundering. He served more than 10 years behind bars, mostly in a Siberian prison camp.
Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of conscience, while the European Court of Human Rights claimed he was denied a fair trial. Both pointed to the political nature of the case, namely Khodorkovsky’s founding of Open Russia – a philanthropic NGO that tried to promote democratic accountability and press freedom in the country.
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It shares similarities to the case of Alexei Navalny, the 46-year-old lawyer and outspoken Kremlin critic who is the leader of the Russia of the Future party and founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, or FBK. Navalny is currently serving an 11.5-year prison sentence in Russia on bogus claims of fraud and contempt of court. His case, like Khodorkovsky’s, is a farcical politically motivated Kremlin conspiracy.
Both understand that in Russia, being put in prison for political reasons is designed to break you. While serving his time, Khodorkovsky was stabbed by a fellow inmate, put in solitary confinement and went on hunger strike. Courageous and philosophical, this section of the book is on a par with prison diary classics, such as Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Bobby Sands’s Writing From Prison and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.
Khodorkovsky was released from prison in December, 2013. Today, he lives in London, where he continues to lead Open Russia. It’s a risky political activity that puts his life in danger. But he believes Russia will eventually move away from a presidential autocracy to become a federal republic. Before such a transition occurs, will there be a coup inside the Kremlin first, or a full-scale military conflict with the West? Khodorkovsky doesn’t claim to have the answers.
This part of the book is not very convincing: “Russia is one of the most important – and powerful – countries in the world,” he claims. “The world must not ignore her.” Its dangerous nuclear arsenal notwithstanding, however, the country is not exactly a global economic or military powerhouse. Khodorkovsky does, in fact, admit this elsewhere in the book, pointing to the Russian economy’s two major weakness: corruption and lack of modernization.
Grigory Yavlinsky understands how corruption works at the highest levels of the Kremlin. The Lviv-born Russian economist and founder of Yabloko, the leading liberal opposition party in post-Soviet Russia, ran as a candidate in the 2018 presidential election; his anti-corruption agenda didn’t win him many votes, though.
I interviewed Yavlinsky back in early May for Britain’s Index on Censorship, when he told me a coup against Putin is unlikely because “Putin has significant support among citizens.” A paper published in early September by Denis Volkov and Andrei Kolesnikov, for the nonpartisan international affairs think tank, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, also noted that “opinion polls consistently show that the majority of respondents [in Russia] support the actions of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine.” That same paper also noted how many Russian citizens still believe Putin’s wartime propaganda, which claims the Russian army is on a mission to liberate Ukraine from Nazis and fascists.
Why is this the case? Khodorkovsky claims the country’s imperialism is one reason. He says it’s deeply embedded in the Russian mentality. When Moscow first engaged in conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014, Putin’s popularity soared among ordinary voters. Those approval ratings increased again last February, after he launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Although Putin’s announcement in mid-September of partial military mobilization led to violent protests, and hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens are fleeing abroad, none of these events signal the beginnings of a large-scale revolution that could topple his regime. As Khodorkovsky keeps reminding us in his book: The average Russian citizen wants Putin in power, mainly because they regard him as a safeguard for their national security. And, like Putin, they also view Ukrainians as inferior to Russians.”
Yavlinsky gives another reason: “In general, people in Russia know their history very poorly,” he said. It might explain why many Russians still swallow Putin’s utopian version of Russia’s Soviet past, which refuses to express regret for the crimes of the Stalin era – especially ones committed against Ukrainians in the 1930s, which includes a man-made genocidal famine, and the deliberate murder of the brightest and best of the Ukrainian intelligentsia.
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Rodric Braithwaite shares that view: “Most Russians [believe] their nation is exceptional,” the 90-year-old British author argues in the opening pages of Russia: Myths Realities. A concise affair, the new book presents 1,000 years of Russian history in just more than 250 pages. Braithwaite, a former British diplomat, builds the book’s central thesis around a controversial question: Who are the true descendants of Kievan Rus? The medieval political federation was located across a territory that is today modern-day Belarus, Ukraine and part of Russia.
In July, 2021, Putin published “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, which claimed the answer was simple: Russia. The essay argued, inaccurately, that Ukrainians and Russians are one people, and Ukraine has never been, and cannot be, a proper nation. Ukrainians, understandably, tell a different story. They see Kyivan Rus (note the Ukrainian translation of the spelling they use) as a foundational historical moment in their nation’s centuries-long struggle for sovereignty.
“The beginnings of Ukrainian history, or the beginnings of Kyivan Rus, is a confrontation between Vikings and local peoples,” Timothy Snyder said in a lecture he gave in Kyiv, in May, 2014, titled Not Even Past: Ukrainian Histories, Russian Politics, European Futures.
Snyder, a Yale historian, whose books on Ukraine include Bloodlands and The Red Prince, has also noted in his work how Ukrainians, like all Europeans, have a long and complicated history, which they had to remake into a national myth during the 19th century.
This past July, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Snyder spoke about how that national mythology has evolved in the 21st century. Today, Ukraine’s national identity is based around three fundamental ideas: plurality, European integration and a politics that looks optimistically to the future. Russia, by contrast, is “obsessed with certain mythical ideas of the past,” Snyder explained.
Braithwaite says Putin’s obsession with this mythical past is “[condemning] his country to widespread ostracism and an indefinite postponement of its chances of becoming normal.” Kievan Rus, he claims, was founded in the ninth century, when Viking slave traders from Scandinavia landed in Kyiv. By 1125, the medieval kingdom was one of the largest polities in Europe.
He briefly discusses the Ukrainian nationalist movement, which gained momentum during the 19th century, when the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture were mocked, and even outlawed, by the Russian empire.
Mostly, though, Braithwaite focuses on Russia’s complex relationship with Europe. That started in 1242, when Kievan Rus was broken apart after an invasion from the Mongols, who remained in Russia for the next 250 years. Kyiv, meanwhile, fell under the control of Poles, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Turks and Tartars for many following centuries.
To the north-east of what had previously been Kievan Rus, people still called themselves “Rus,” keeping the language of Kiev, its unifying religion and local versions of its political system. The western part of the Mongol empire eventually fragmented and a new state gradually emerged: Muscovy. Braithwaite describes how the reign of Ivan III (who ruled from 1462 to 1505) paved the way for Russia to become a major imperial global power. The Russian Tsar ruled from Moscow, which did not exist in the time of Kievan Rus. Nevertheless, the Mongol occupation left Russians with an identity complex.
“Russians were neither European nor Asian,” Braithwaite says. This is a point that both he and Khodorkovsky continually stress in their books, while still agreeing that European and Russian culture are inextricably linked. The outpouring of Russian culture that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries, after all, drew heavily from the Western tradition.
Fyodor Dostoevsky believed his country was becoming too European. The Russian novelist was part of an infamous public debate that split the country’s intelligentsia into two distinctive camps during the mid-19th century. Slavophiles claimed Russia has always been defined by its Slav culture and by its Orthodox religion. Westerners, conversely, claimed Russia needed to keep embracing the culture and politics of the West to keep modernizing at the same pace of its European neighbours.
Both authors delve into this topic and remind us why those debates continue today. Clearly, Putin is in the Slavophile camp. So, too, are most Russian citizens, who have in the last decade retreated “into an unpleasant, sickly and defiant nationalism,” Braithwaite says.
Yavlinsky’s words to me earlier this year echoed a central message that emerges from The Russia Conundrum and Russia: Myths Realities: “Russia is a European country,” he explained.
“The only positive prospect for Russia is the European one. Attempts to make a separate civilization out of it, are fraught with disaster and loss of the future.”
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