dabble in business. Before he was out of his mid-twenties, Khodorkovsky had tried his hand at trade, importing personal computers to the Soviet Union, and, more significant, at finance, devising ways to squeeze cash out of the Soviet planned-economy noncash behemoth. He served as an economic adviser to Yeltsin’s first government when Russia was still part of the USSR. During the failed August 1991 coup, he was on the barricades in front of the Russian White House, physically helping to defend his government.
By the early 1990s, in other words, the former Komsomol functionary had been completely reformed. He and his friend and business partner, a former software engineer named Leonid Nevzlin, authored a book-length capitalist manifesto titled
In 1995–1996 the Russian government asked the country’s richest men for loans, leveraging controlling shares in Russia’s biggest companies—which, according to the arrangement, they would be keeping once the government, predictably, defaulted on the loans. As a result, Khodorkovsky came into possession of Yukos, a newly created oil conglomerate with reserves among the largest in the world.
His next change of heart came in 1998. The financial crisis that year put Khodorkovsky’s bank out of business. The oil company was in dire straits: the price of oil on the world’s markets was $8 a barrel but Yukos’s outmoded equipment placed the cost of producing one barrel at $12. The company had no cash to pay its hundreds of thousands of employees. “I would go to our oil rigs,” Khodorkovsky wrote more than ten years later, “and people would not even yell at me. They were not going on strike: they were understanding. It’s just that they were fainting from hunger. Especially the young people who had small children and did not have their own vegetable garden. And the hospitals—before then, we used to buy medication, we would send people to be treated elsewhere if they needed it, but now we did not have the money. But the worst thing was these understanding faces. People were just saying, ‘We never expected anything good. We are just grateful you came here to talk to us. We’ll be patient.’”
At the age of thirty-seven, one of Russia’s richest men discovered the concept of social responsibility. In fact, he probably felt he invented it. It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless. So Khodorkovsky resolved to build civil society in Russia. “Until that point,” he wrote, “I saw business as a game. It was a game in which you wanted to win but losing was also an option. It was a game in which hundreds of thousands of people came to work in the morning to play with me. And in the evening they would go back to their own lives, which had nothing to do with me.” It was a hugely ambitious goal—but, for one of the handful of men who felt they had created a market economy from scratch, not an absurdly ambitious one.
Khodorkovsky formed a foundation and called it Otkrytaya Rossiya, Open Russia. He funded Internet cafes in the provinces, to get people to learn and to talk to one another. He funded training for journalists all over the country, and he sponsored the most talented television journalists to come study in Moscow for a month. He founded a boarding school for disadvantaged children; following the tragedy in Beslan, several dozen survivors became students there. Before long, he was stepping in where Western foundations and governments were pulling out; Russia was considered a stable democracy now, after all. Some said he was funding more than half of all the nongovernmental organizations in Russia; some said he was funding 80 percent of them. In 2003, Yukos pledged to give $100 million over ten years to the Russian State University for the Humanities, the best liberal arts school in the country—the first time a private company in Russia had contributed a significant amount of money to an educational institution.
Khodorkovsky also became preoccupied with the idea of transforming his company into a properly managed, transparently governed corporation. He hired McKinsey & Company, the global management consulting giant, to reform the management structure, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, another world giant, to create the accounting structure from scratch. “Before Pricewaterhouse came along, all the Yukos accountants knew how to do was stomp their feet and steal a bit at a time,” Khodorkovsky’s former tax lawyer told me. “They had to be taught everything.” His partners grumbled—Khodorkovsky’s efforts seemed to be misplaced—but he was determined to turn Yukos into the first Russian multinational corporation. To this end, he hired a Washington, D.C.–based public relations firm. “We would set up five interviews in New York, and we would spend the day going from interview to interview,” the consultant who worked with him remembered. “Not many CEOs would spend this kind of time. We got a
On July 2, 2003, Platon Lebedev, the chairman of the board of Yukos’s parent company, Group Menatep, was arrested. Several weeks later, Yukos’s head of security, a former KGB officer, was behind bars. Khodorkovsky himself was told by those in the know and those who could simply follow the obvious logic of events that he, too, would be arrested soon. Someone even wrote up a prescription for Khodorkovsky of things to do to avoid arrest; the document, commissioned by one of his public-relations people, was never seen by Khodorkovsky because another of his publicity men ripped it up in outrage. In any case, it was obvious what Khodorkovsky should do: leave the country. His partner and coauthor with him of
There was a talk Khodorkovsky had been giving for a bit over a year at this point. I had heard it once when he addressed a group of young writers, assembled at his request. The point of the speech was that Russia should join the modern world: stop running its companies like medieval fiefdoms at best and prisons at worst; transform its economy into one based on the export of knowledge and expertise rather than oil and gas; value its smart, educated people—like us writers—and pay them well. Khodorkovsky was not a great public speaker: he tended to be stiff, and his voice was soft and incongruously high for a man of his height, his looks, and his wealth. But he had the force of conviction and the weight of his reputation on his side; people generally wanted to know what he wanted to say to them.
So instead of leaving the country or genuflecting before Putin—for this was precisely the advice the ripped-up paper had contained—Khodorkovsky decided to create his own lecture circuit. He hired Marina Litvinovich, Putin’s former image-maker, to coach him on public speaking. She told him he had a way of belaboring an idea even after the audience had come over to his side, and this caused him to lose his tempo. Khodorkovsky, a few assistants, and eight bodyguards commenced several months of living out of a chartered jet. He went around the country speaking to students, workers, even military recruits on one occasion (though that engagement seems to have been an organizers’ error). Litvinovich sat in the front row with a letter-size piece of paper with the word “Tempo” written on it; whenever Russia’s richest man perseverated, she held up the sign for him to see.
Over the weekend of October 18, 2003, the Khodorkovsky team was in Saratov, a city on the Volga River. It snowed and, unusual for that time of year, the snow stayed on the ground. For some reason no one quite understood or at least no one articulated, the entire group went outside and wandered in the vast white expanse. They then returned to their hotel, Khodorkovsky abruptly bade everyone good night and disappeared, and the rest of the group got quickly and morbidly drunk. The next morning Khodorkovsky told Litvinovich to return to Moscow: she had not seen her three-year-old son in weeks, and Khodorkovsky could manage the next destination without her.
The phone calls came in the dark predawn hours of October 25: Khodorkovsky had been arrested at the Novosibirsk airport at eight in the morning, five in Moscow.
