Oligarch plots political revenge from jail - Sunday Times - Times Online

Mark Franchetti, Moscow



THE former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was arrested after declaring his opposition to President Vladimir Putin, will launch a career in politics when he is released at the end of his eight-year sentence for fraud and tax evasion, his wife has revealed.
Inna Khodorkovskaya said that far from being shattered by his incarceration in a remote Siberian prison colony, he is determined to dedicate his life to securing political reform.



“Of course he’ll do politics when he comes out,” said Khodorkovskaya in her first interview with a western newspaper. “That’s the way he is. He wants to change this society, that’s for sure. And just by being there in jail, with his presence alone, he is already changing it. You’ll see.

“He is not broken. On the contrary he’s even stronger. He is very focused and is in it for the long haul. Support for him is growing and will continue to grow as people understand that he is different from other so-called oligarchs. People in Russia are starting to wake up.”

Her comments coincided with a 12-year plan to modernise Russia that her husband unveiled last Friday in the opposition paper Kommersant. It calls for measures to curb corruption and create a “paternalistic” government that would aim to treble gross domestic product, boost the population by nearly 80m and create new armed forces.

In full-page newspaper advertisements the previous week, Khodorkovsky demanded a new breed of officials, “those interested in the fate of the country and its people, not their own unbridled personal enrichment”. “The country needs a new political elite — heroes, not mediocrity,” he added.

Khodorkovskaya, 36, spoke out after seeing her 42-year-old husband for the first time in the prison colony where he is expected to remain until 2011.

After his arrest in 2003 Khodorkovsky, who built a personal fortune of £4.5 billion, was held in an overcrowded Moscow jail for two years.

In a campaign orchestrated by the Kremlin, he was stripped of Yukos, his oil company, and much of his fortune.

Last month he was sent more than 3,000 miles east of Moscow by train to penal colony YaG 14/10, in Krasnokamensk, a uranium-polluted area of Siberia. For 10 days his wife and children had no idea where he was.

“I read in the press that he had been sent as far away as possible but I hoped it wasn’t true,” said Khodorkovskaya, who once worked for her him as an accountant.

“My heart was racing when I received the letter from the prison authorities stating where he was. Until the very end I hoped the papers were wrong and that he’d been sent closer to home. They dispatched him so far away because they want to isolate him. They want people to forget about him.”

A few days later she set off on her own arduous journey to Krasnokamensk — six hours by plane and 10 hours by car across Siberia’s desolate steppes. The colony, where more than 1,000 inmates are serving sentences for theft and fraud, opened in the 1960s when prisoners were used to build one of the Soviet Union’s largest uranium processing plants.

The area is heavily contaminated with radioactive waste. and in winter the temperatures drop to -40C. The summers are stiflingly hot and the colony becomes infested with mosquitoes. Tuberculosis is rife.

Khodorkovsky, who lived in a luxurious Moscow villa and travelled by limousine and private jet, now sleeps in a bunk bed in one of 13 army-style barracks and shares his dormitory with about 100 other men.

He is woken at 6am and puts on a black uniform bearing his surname, initials and the number 8, to identify his barrack. Number 8 is said to house the colony’s blatniye, or bandits, its most powerful inmates.
During Khodorkovsky’s detention in Moscow his wife was allowed to visit him only once a month for 45 minutes. They talked by telephone through a thick partition of glass and metallic netting.



Visiting rules are more relaxed at the colony. Like the other inmates, Khodorkovsky is allowed four three-day visits a year and six visits of three hours each. For the longer visits the prisoners and their families are locked in a rundown Soviet-era building where they have a room measuring 9ft by 9ft and access to a small communal bathroom and kitchen. Khodorkovskaya used this to cook a pan of fried potatoes, one of her husband’s favourite dishes.

“It’s difficult to find the words to explain what it felt like to be with him for the first time after so long. It filled me with new energy and strength to face the future,” said Khodorkovskaya, who arrived at the colony carrying a bag full of fresh vegetables, boiled meat, clothes and Russian music CDs from the tycoon’s collection.

“He’s changed a lot but I recognised the man I knew before his arrest,” she added. “He has become even more determined. He is very calm and far more philosophical about life. Before he was always focused on his work. Now he believes that the family is what matters most.

“He is not consumed by anger. Instead he is a man with a clear vision. He is feeling combative.”

Khodorkovskaya, who is shy of publicity, said that her husband had joked about the fact that he will be made to sew mittens. As the only graduate there he will also give classes in business and science.

He has subscribed to half a dozen newspapers and asked for several books, ranging from theological and academic texts to novels, including Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

The couple have a 14-year-old daughter Natasha and six-year-old twin boys Ilya and Gleb. Khodorkovsky probably will not see them again until he is freed as he and his wife believe that the trip would be too traumatic for them. Instead, he has opted to exchange the shorter family visits for telephone calls to his children.

“He has no regrets. Nor do I,” said Khodorkovskaya. “Neither of us would have wanted to flee abroad. Russia is our country. They will never break him. He is a man who is going places.”


Sunday Times - Times Online, 11.14.2005

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How many times I'll have to say that there was no private jet and luxurious villa...