Ex-Yukos Head Khodorkovsky Warns Putin From Jail

The Kremlin may have destroyed Yukos but it has inflicted “senseless” damage on Russia’s economy in the process, jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky said in comments published on Tuesday.

The former chief executive of Yukos said he had come to terms with a future of several years in jail and knew there was little chance of saving the firm he founded, now going under the hammer to pay vast tax debts. “Many people might think this odd, but parting with my property will not be unbearably painful for me,” he said in a wistful article in Vedomosti business daily.

“Like many, many prisoners before me, both well-known and unknown, I should say ’thank you’ to prison. It has given me months of intense contemplation, a time to re-examine the many sides of life.” In a long and philosophical look at his predicament and that of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the man once said to be Russia’s richest billionaire said the bureaucracy had moved from serving the government to running it.

“The question is what lessons the country will take from the Yukos affair, whose finale is the most senseless and destructive event for the economy in all of President Vladimir Putin’s time in power… No true patriot would give his life for a bunch of bureaucrats who are only interested in feathering their own nests,” he wrote.

Khodorkovsky, writing under the headline “Property and Freedom”, said he was happier without his fortune, once put at $15 billion —- making him Russia’s richest person. “I have realised that wealth on its own, especially vast wealth, in no way makes a person free... I had to close my eyes to a lot of things, and make my peace with a lot, for the sake of my wealth, to keep it and grow it. I didn’t just run my property, it ran me.

”I would like to warn the young people of today, those who will soon be in positions of power. Don’t be jealous of wealthy people ... Wealth opens new avenues, but it enslaves your creative faculties and takes over your personality,“ he said.

Khodorkovsky’s demise is widely seen as a Kremlin-orchestrated campaign to punish him for his political ambitions and renationalise prized oil assets that he won in shady privatisations during the 1990s. But his long critique of Putin’s policies —- in parts reading like an embryonic political manifesto —- did not end in any clear challenge.

”I would, of course, like to help our country to flourish and become free. But I am willing to wait, if the authorities decide to keep me in prison,“ he wrote.

And drawing a parallel with the hero of Alexandre Dumas’ romantic novel about a man who is wrongly imprisoned by his rivals, Khodorkovsky had a reassuring word for his enemies. ”They want to put me away, far away, for five years or more, because they are afraid I will take revenge. These small-minded people think everyone lives by their rules. But don’t worry, I’m not planning to become the Count of Monte Cristo.“

(Mosnews, 12.28.2004)