London Review of Books: letter to the Editor

London Review of Books
March 4, 2010

Letter to the Editor

The Quiet Philanthropist

I worked for Yukos for four years from June 2001 as one of the Western staff Khodorkovsky brought in to modernise a company that was still more like a Soviet enterprise than an international oil company five years after privatisation. Keith Gessen gets most of the facts right (except that Yukos was never listed in London, only as a US ADR; the predator Rosneft was listed in London), but doesn’t pay enough attention to the prevailing atmosphere of the Yeltsin-era economy (LRB, 25 February). If fear was the staple of personal experience, lack of clarity (neyasnost) was the leitmotif of everything to do with the economy, from heavy industry to the ownership of land and lodgings. The young MBK (as Mikhail Borisovich was known in-house) and all the other future oligarchs had the prescience to see through the murk, and to take advantage of it. That is what capitalists do, and it is never a pretty picture at the capital-formation stage. In the case of Yukos, MBK started with an unwieldy and irrational jumble of rusting oil infrastructure, bought for a fraction of its potential value, and gradually modernised and rationalised it through substantial further investment. To have realised that potential in a transparent sale (which would have had to be to a foreign investor) would have taken time, and that, along with money and credibility, was what the Yeltsin government had run out of.

MBK once told an interviewer that he was three generations of the Rockefeller family in one person. He is an extremely complex person, but the experts who regard Open Russia and all his philanthropic efforts as exercises in image-enhancement are seeing less than the whole picture. I moved to London in mid-2003, and thus missed the balaclava-clad tax police storming in with Uzis to seize computers (during one of the first raids, my colleagues told me, they took the monitors, thinking that was where the data were stored) and the catastrophe that followed. In London, as things began to deteriorate, I was contacted by some surprising people: the president of Magdalen College, Oxford, for example, who told me that MBK had endowed a scholarship fund to bring ten promising Russians to study there every year (being already fully endowed, this programme was apparently unaffected by what happened). This wasn’t the only instance of quiet philanthropy I came across, and if ten students a year won’t change Russia, the thousands of computers and IT-training courses he provided to provincial schools will over time have had a significant impact. It seems to me there must have been ways of improving his image that would have been more cost-effective and had a more immediate and more public effect, if that was all he was interested in. In any case, whatever his motives, they have no bearing on the merits of the judicial travesty that keeps him in Cell Block Four. He is certainly no worse a person than the arch-cynic currently running the country he obstinately refused to abandon.

London N1