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Version 1 Version 2
After Freedom, Russian Dissident Says He Won’t Enter Politics Now Free, Russian Dissident Says He Won’t Enter Politics
(about 9 hours later)
BERLIN — The setting was fraught with symbolism. In the museum at Checkpoint Charlie, the best-known crossing point along the now vanished Berlin Wall, the man who until Friday was Russia’s most famous prisoner faced reporters for the first time on Sunday and told of his last 10 years in custody and how just two days earlier he had been freed suddenly and flown here to the German capital. BERLIN — After a decade of incarceration that transformed Russia’s wealthiest man into its most famous political prisoner, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky faced journalists in Berlin on Sunday following a head-spinning 36-hour journey to freedom.
The lack of rancor expressed by the former prisoner, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, Russia’s richest man until he ran afoul of President Vladimir V. Putin 10 years ago, was striking. It simply did not surface during the hour or so he spent with a small group of Russian-speaking journalists. Calm and businesslike in a dark blue suit and tie, he appeared fit and was decidedly feisty. Yet, at least for the moment, he said, he plans to stay well clear of Russian politics;will certainly not lay claim to his former oil company, Yukos, and probably will avoid Russia itself. Mr. Khodorkovsky recounted with a detached humor how, in the hours after a surprising clemency from his nemesis, President Vladimir V. Putin, he was awakened at 2 a.m. on Friday by prison guards at a penitentiary near the Finnish border and whisked away, first to St. Petersburg, then onto a special flight to Germany. “I was put on a plane, so to say, in the best traditions of the 1970s,” he said, and his guards waited to leave “until the door was shut.”
Asked how his unexpected liberation came about, Mr. Khodorkovsky said he had first written to Mr. Putin on Nov. 12 asking for clemency, after the former German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who spent two and a half years working on his behalf, assured him that he would not have to admit any guilt. Arrested on charges of embezzlement, Mr. Khodorkovsky became a powerful dissident voice, faulting Mr. Putin for consolidating authority and stifling dissent. He said that he had written Mr. Putin to assure that he would not involve himself in everyday Russian politics, and insisted that he could not, for the moment, risk returning to Russian soil or even be sure about how much of his once-vast wealth he retained.
That provision of no admission of guilt proviso was crucial, Mr. Khodorkovsky insisted, not so much for himself as for all the employees of Yukos, which has since been broken up and largely reconstituted as the Rosneft company, run by the Putin ally Igor I. Sechin. But there was nothing of the penitent about him.
Admitting guilt, he argued, could have resulted in all employees being accused as part of a large unit of conspiracy or of committing crimes, or it could have allowed Russian authorities to seek the extradition of Yukos employees who had fled abroad. During an hour spent with Russian-speaking journalists, Mr. Khodorkovsky, 50, exhibited the same calm assurance with which he once confronted Mr. Putin, vowing that he would work to help other political prisoners in Russia. Showing no trace of rancor or bombast, he also related some of the lessons he took away from his years in prison, saying that Russians themselves had to change.
Talk of clemency, he said, first arose, during the presidency of Dmitri A. Medvedev, a Putin ally who served one term before stepping aside last year to allow Russia’s most dominant politician to resume the office he held from 2000 to 2008. “I think the Russian problem is not just the president as a person,” Mr. Khodorkovsky said. “The problem is that our citizens, by a large majority, don’t understand that their fate, they have to be responsible for it themselves. They are happy to delegate it, say, to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and then they will entrust it to somebody else.”
Mr. Genscher worked behind the scenes, with the knowledge of just a few German and Russian officials, to bring off Friday’s release, he said. He added: “For such a big country as Russia, this is a dead end.”
Asked whether he was grateful to Mr. Putin for clemency, Mr. Khodorkovsky paused, chose his words carefully, then said: “I was really contemplating for a long time how I would express what I feel toward Mr. Putin. All these years, all decisions in my case were made by one person. And it would be hard to say that I am thankful to him. Let me say: I am happy about this decision. That would be the most precise.” This was not quite Dostoyevsky emerging from the penal colony, but Mr. Khodorkovsky was recounting something like a spiritual conversion.
The police detained Mr. Khodorkovsky in October 2003 on his private jet in Novosibirsk, after months during which he had increasingly challenged Mr. Putin by funding opposition parties and social movements. Earlier that year, the two men had clashed publicly at a Kremlin meeting. After 10 years of being watched by cameras installed over his bed, his workplace, his table in the canteen, and at his every meeting with lawyers, he was free, and caught in a whirlwind of travel and revelation.
Mr. Khodorkovksy said that before that meeting, unidentified presidential aides had indicated he could speak frankly, even on television. But doing so set him on a path that ended in two trials and a decade in jail. Arriving in Berlin — wearing a parka that officials hastily bought for him in the St. Petersburg airport to replace his prison-issued coat, he explained in an interview with the Moscow magazine The New Times — he was met by a former German foreign minister, ensconced in a luxury hotel, reunited with his parents and grown son, and met his 4-year-old granddaughter for the first time.
Mr. Khodorkovsky said he had no interest in entering Russian politics, “meaning the fight for power.” And he ended his public appearances on Sunday with a shoving, chaotic news conference at the museum to Checkpoint Charlie – the American outpost that symbolized the Cold War, America’s toehold in the wall that divided Berlin.
“I don’t want to do it because politicians in Russia have to occupy a not-very-sincere position” he said. During all these 10 years, he said, he has earned “the right to be totally sincere, and to say what I think.” That, he added, “is higher than any politics.” One of the architects of his freedom was Hans-Dietrich Genscher, 86, the wily former German foreign minister known here as the “old fox,” who used his own and special Moscow-Berlin channels to broker a clemency over the past two and a half years.
That does not mean, he stressed, that he will not be socially active, particularly on behalf of prisoners. He said he had counted himself very lucky during his incarceration because he had a loving family waiting for him, in contrast to 90 percent of prisoners he had met who had nowhere to go even if they did get out of jail. Negotiations started after Dmitri A. Medvedev, a close Putin ally who was head of state from 2008 to 2012 and is now prime minister, first talked of clemency when he was president, Mr. Khodorkovsky said. But there was always one hitch. “They told me, and repeated again and again, every time: I have to admit my guilt.”
Mr. Khodorkovsky’s departure from Russia followed so swiftly on Mr. Putin’s first word on Thursday that he might grant clemency that the prisoner ended up flying to Germany while his parents were still in Moscow, and his wife was apparently on her way there. The official reason Mr. Putin gave for his decision was that Mr. Khodorkovsky had suffered enough and needed to see his mother, who has been undergoing treatment for cancer. She had recently returned to Moscow, however, from a Berlin hospital. Such an admission was unacceptable, Mr. Khodorkovsky said on Sunday, because it could have implicated every former employee of his oil company, Yukos, as part of a crime or a conspiracy. Colleagues who were still in Russia risked prosecution, he said, and those who had fled abroad could have faced extradition.
The release itself, Mr. Khodorkovsky said, happened swiftly. He was summoned at 2 a.m. from his bed in the penal colony near the Finnish border where he had most recently been incarcerated and then whisked to Germany, in what he called “the best tradition of the 1970s.” But after he learned that Mr. Genscher was offering clemency with no admission of guilt required, Mr. Khodorkovsky said, he wrote to Mr. Putin on Nov. 12, requesting clemency and with an attached letter that made clear he would not engage in politics, or try to recover shares of Yukos – most of whose holdings now form the Rosneft company, controlled by another Putin ally, Igor I. Sechin.
That was the only allusion he made to the Cold War, even though his meetings with the Russian-speaking reporters and a later news conference took place in a museum with extensive reminders of Soviet bloc days. The formal reason Mr. Khodorkovsky cited for his request was his mother’s health and treatment in Germany, he said. That was why he came straight here, even though his mother, Marina, had flown home for the holidays from her Berlin hospital. In fact, things were so hurried that Mr. Khodorkovksy’s wife, Inna, had also traveled to Moscow, he said.
Mr. Khodorkovsky indicated that, at least for now, he would not be returning to Russia. He specifically asked to go abroad, he said. He also wrote Mr. Putin an assurance that he would not try to recover any Yukos holdings. For now, he made clear, Russia is off limits for him. After being convicted there twice — first for failing to pay taxes on his oil and then, curiously, for stealing the oil in the first place — he still faces a $500 million prosecution stemming from his first tax case. Only if the Supreme Court of Russia were to dismiss that investigation might he visit his native land.
That decision appears to have secured the fortunes of Rosneft and Mr. Sechin. “I don’t want to waste my time on it,” Mr. Khodorkovsky said. Once worth billions of dollars, he said he did not know how much money he had left now. But, he said with a smile, “enough to live on.” “To take a risk to go to Russia and then, on formal grounds, not be able to leave — I just cannot do it,” he said.
Asked about his relations with Mr. Putin, his incarceration and his attitude now, Mr. Khodorkovsky painted himself — as have phalanxes of lawyers and public relations teams engaged over the years to keep his cause and name alive — as someone very far from the brash, young oligarch, one of a band of mostly young male Russians who amassed huge wealth in the Soviet collapse of the 1990s.
Tracing the arc of his relations with the Russian president — who, he suggested, had released him partly because of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi —, and partly out of a broader concern for Russia’s image, Mr. Khodorkovsky began in February 2003, when he famously confronted Mr. Putin during a televised meeting in the Kremlin.
Mr. Khodorkovsky said would never have given such a speech, criticizing corruption and other abuses, if presidential aides had not first assured him that it was fine, even desirable. Two weeks later, he noted, the first case against Yukos was launched. He was arrested in October 2003, on his private jet, at a Siberian airport.
“Of course the reaction for me was unexpected,” he said, though friends and others had warned him that he was crossing a line with the speech, and also by funding opposition parties, civic groups and society. “But what I couldn’t let myself do, what some other person could, was reverse my words. I would not lie,” he said, adding that such stubbornness shows how ill-suited he would be to politics, at least in Russia.
On Sunday, he did, however, pledge to stay active for his Yukos colleague, Platon A. Lebedev, and political prisoners in Russia. And he signaled that, while he has no time for the day-to-day dogfight that is politics in his country today, he wants to see it become more democratic.
The biggest change in 10 years in Russia, he said, is that the number of people prepared to control their fate has grown “beyond a margin of error,” though it is still too small.
Asked about the biggest change in himself, he gave an impish shrug: “I grew 10 years older.”
More seriously, he said at another point, he realized that people, and not industrial possessions that made him a fortune, are the most important element in life. He said his biggest loss in jail was a decade of “lost communication” with his family. And one of his biggest sadnesses was that 90 percent of his fellow inmates had no such fortune, and “nowhere to go” even if let out of jail.
Physically, Mr. Khodorkovsky, dressed in a dark blue suit and tie, looked healthy. Mentally, he said, he had always been an optimist. Besides, he added, Russian prisons today — while occasionally freezing, or with rotten food — are not in that physical respect the gulag of Soviet-era literature.
“I was trying to look at my situation as a challenge,” he said. “I was not torturing myself — yes, there were some days that were depressing, but basically I was not carrying them around inside me.”
“When I crossed the threshold of prison,” he added, “I understood this is for a long time. And then immediately quit smoking. If they are going to bury me, let them do it themselves, without my participation.”