"The Khodorkovsky Project is finished"

An interview with Gleb Pavlovsky, president of the Effective Politics
Foundation
Author: Boris Pasternak

[YUKOS oil company President Mikhail Khodorkovsky was detained and placed under arrest exactly a year ago, on October 25, 2003. We discuss the prospects of the YUKOS case with Gleb Pavlovsky, president of the Effective Politics Foundation.]

YUKOS oil company President Mikhail Khodorkovsky was detained and placed under arrest exactly a year ago, on October 25, 2003. We discuss the prospects of the YUKOS case with Gleb Pavlovsky, president of the Effective Politics Foundation.

Question: Khodorkovsky said in one of his interviews that exposed to the attack are the people, rather than the company, and his saw no intention of the authorities to ruin the business but efforts of the rivals to oust some figures from the business. Do you detach the case of Khodorkovsky from the case of YUKOS?

Gleb Pavlovsky: I think this all began with an attack on definite people. However, this is common in politics that somebody turns a large-scale conflict into a mechanism for personal elevation. From some moment, everybody started opening one's own front and many "cases of YUKOS" have appeared. Undoubtedly, the near-bottom layer flared up. However, this layer hadn't accumulated by itself; it has been upheld by the politics of the 1990s. Some had been allowed to act and other had been cut from political and economic resources, and those second were waiting.

Question: Do you think that vengeance is present in the case of YUKOS and similar cases?

Gleb Pavlovsky: Russia undoubtedly has a huge build-up of vengeance; it posed a real threat to our country in late 1990s. The entire public and political project, led by Putin, had been constructed as a dam before a deluge of social vengeance, on which the opposed nomenclature had staked. It turned out later that this vengeance couldn't be stopped with the election alone. It is easy to stop a head-on attack of the street, but it is impossible to stop a social request for generally recognized structure of property which everybody admits as fair. The state must present it to the public in the form which the majority of the population thinks is right.

Question: Is there a long way to achieve that?

Gleb Pavlovsky: A long way; in my opinion, transformation of capital assets into state-owned assets is becoming the main method of morally legalizing the system of ownership; i.e. a certain bent for state capitalism is inevitable. We'll try to preserve the personal freedom in this process.

Question: Do you think nationalization of property is a forced measure for the state, rather than attempt of some lobbyist groups to nationalize the property to suit their own interests?

Gleb Pavlovsky: It is politically. Lobbyism bites something on the edges, as usual. However, an attempt of permitting lobbyism in the prior issue of legalizing the property is equal to suicide of the state. The incumbent authorities won't accept that. The people must give the mandate for property to the state.

Question: I've looked through results of public opinion polls with regard to the case of YUKOS. The majority holds the ground that YUKOS be given an opportunity to pay all taxes and its owners are punished for fraud. Only 20% demand that the company be nationalized. However, we are now observing attempts of ruining the company, deprive it of the business...What is being attempted now: nationalization, deprivation or ruination?

These are different notions. A giant financial and industrial complex is implied under the word YUKOS; a wish is available to disintegrate it. The question is: what fate afterwards expects fragments of this business? Who will supervise them? The case of YUKOS is in this very phase now. The state has to act openly here, otherwise we'll see a pig in a river of piranhas. This cannot be allowed for many reasons. The state will have to enter the scene and offer at least a certain scheme.

Question: Do you think these questions are now being discussed with Khodorkovsky or he's merely sitting and something is happening outside the jail?

Gleb Pavlovsky: Some discussions probably take place, but they don't have a proper language. Even when Khodorkovsky is trying to speak of the generation, for some reason he's switching to liberalism. I can say for certain that nobody in the Kremlin will heed theories about liberalism - simply because the people there use a different language to discuss the same issues.

Translated by Andrei Ryabochkin

( Russian Text - rather different! - from Vremya Novostey, translation from The Johnson's Russia List)