Jailed Russian Oil Tycoon Says He Plans to Run for Parliament

By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: September 1, 2005
MOSCOW, Aug. 31 - Prison has done little to silence Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the former oil tycoon who received a nine-year sentence three months ago. He has published jailhouse treatises, granted interviews and issued regular statements through his lawyers. Now he plans to run for Parliament.

Seizing on a legal loophole, Mr. Khodorkovsky, Russia's most famous prisoner, on Wednesday announced an improbable effort to win elected office in a special parliamentary election in December. Despite his conviction on charges of fraud and tax evasion, a verdict that some here believe was orchestrated by President Vladimir V. Putin's government, officials acknowledged that technically he had the right to run.

Whether he actually will get the chance appears doubtful, but Mr. Khodorkovsky's announcement indicated that his conviction had done nothing to moderate his public opposition to the government or his efforts to position himself as a prisoner of conscience.

Mr. Khodorkovsky, 42, remains a polarizing figure, a man who amassed enormous wealth in shady privatization deals in the 1990's before refashioning himself as a Western-style executive devoted to transparency and philanthropy.

A victory in the district, considered a liberal one, would not be inconceivable. A national opinion poll conducted after his conviction found that 8 percent of those who responded would consider voting for him if he ran for president.

Mr. Khodorkovsky - recently transferred to a cell with 15 other prisoners in Matrosskaya Tishina prison here in what his lawyers said was retaliation for his jailhouse pronouncements - opened his campaign with a sharply worded critique.

"The current Kremlin regime has exhausted itself," he said in a statement published on his Web site, at www.khodorkovsky.ru, "and its days are numbered."

So, too, may be Mr. Khodorkovsky's candidacy.

Under the law, he can run for office because his conviction is not considered final until his appeals are exhausted. But after supporters began floating the idea of a Khodorkovsky campaign, the authorities announced that his first appeal would be heard on Sept. 14, well before the filing deadline.

One of his lawyers, Yuri M. Schmidt, said in a telephone interview that the authorities had accelerated the timetable, leaving little time to prepare an effective appeal, let alone mount a campaign. "In reality, there is no hope," Mr. Schmidt said.

The chairman of the national election commission, Aleksandr A. Veshnyakov, said Wednesday that Mr. Khodorkovsky could run, but in remarks cited by Russian news agencies, he suggested that even if he were to register and win election, he would lose his seat in Parliament once his conviction was upheld, and that he would have to remain in prison.

Even so, Mr. Khodorkovsky's supporters vowed to press ahead, if only symbolically. Ivan V. Starikov, a member of the liberal Union of Right Forces, said supporters would collect many times the 5,500 signatures required to qualify Mr. Khodorkovsky as a candidate to represent District 201 in Moscow.

That alone, Mr. Starikov said, would show the depth of public opposition to his prosecution. "Under any outcome, even if he is not allowed to register, it will be his moral victory," Mr. Starikov said in a telephone interview.

In his periodic statements from prison, Mr. Khodorkovsky has sounded repentant, philosophical at times, but above all defiant.

"We were born in a country where half of the population has been in jail," he wrote in an exchange of letters published on his Web site on Aug. 1. "We are direct descendants of the Gulag. How can you function without handcuffs? In time, our minds and souls will break free from this heritage of imprisonment; then our hands will be free as well."

(The New York Times, 9.1.2001)