Tycoon's Trial Is Test for Capitalism in Russia

SINCE his incarceration eight months ago, Russia's richest man, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, has made only fleeting public appearances - behind bars on a prison video screen, hustled from police vans amid a phalanx of security guards, or, as his trial began on Wednesday in a Moscow courtroom, seated inside a cage.

In these glimpses, Mr. Khodorkovsky looks pale, resolute and unemotional, much as he did in the years before the state police arrested him at gunpoint aboard his private jet in October, charging him with looting public assets and evading hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes.

Until shortly after his arrest, Mr. Khodorkovsky, 40, was the chief executive of Yukos Oil, which he had transformed into one of Russia's biggest and most shrewdly operated companies. He had amassed a personal fortune of at least $15 billion. Along the way, he jousted politically with Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin; deftly courted American financiers, legislators and opinion makers; showered money on public relations firms; and played the role of freshly minted capitalist with singular aplomb.

And until his arrest, Mr. Khodorkovsky's past as one of Russia's wiliest and most hard-nosed tycoons seemed a rapidly fading memory. He began his career as a banker who built his fortune on a series of highly criticized privatizations of state-owned companies, like Yukos. Russia's former president, Boris N. Yeltsin, and a senior deputy, Anatoly B. Chubais, spearheaded the privatizations during the 1990's. The deals were plagued by inside maneuvering and fire-sale prices, giving rise to a group of powerful businessmen, including Mr. Khodorkovsky, who became known as oligarchs.

Perhaps inevitably, given the arc of his career, Mr. Khodorkovsky's showcase trial - freighted with the possibility of a lengthy prison term and a Yukos bankruptcy - promises to offer one of the first public referendums on the state of Russia's riches. Its outcome could help shape for years the nature of the country's experiments in capitalism.

"This should be Russia's O. J. trial and should be the most public and most important bit of jurisprudence in modern Russian history," said Bernard Sucher, a Moscow investment banker, referring to the attention on the trial of O. J. Simpson in the United States. "Most people want to look deeply at what happened here in the 1990's, and this is a chance to come to terms with how the country ended up the way it did at the end of the Yeltsin years."

Mr. Khodorkovsky and his lawyers have disputed the charges against him, saying they are an attempt to neutralize him as a political reformer. They argue that a main fraud charge was already settled last year and that the shifting ground rules that defined the privatization rush in the 1990's contained few clear-cut guidelines for any businessman to follow. Even so, in an effort to accommodate a prosecution widely regarded as orchestrated by the Kremlin, Mr. Khodorkovsky at one point offered a rare mea culpa for some of his business practices.

"WE have made many stupid mistakes, because of our ambitions and because we failed to understand what is going on in the country and the entire complexity of its social and regional peculiarities," Mr. Khodorkovsky wrote in a letter published by Russia's Interfax news service in April. "These are our mistakes and not an inevitable result of liberal democratic reforms. Forgive us if you can. Let us make up for it; we know how to do this."

By the time his trial started on Wednesday, however, Mr. Khodorkovsky's stance had hardened. Speaking on his own behalf from inside the defendant's cage, he reverted to the dispassionate and steely certitude that had guided his ascent through the ranks of Russia's scrappy business world.

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