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

From time to time, I come across negative or unflattering portrayals of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and skewed presentations of the series of events which led to his eventual status as a political prisoner of the Russian government.(*) It’s only natural in such a politically charged case, especially in light of the persecution campaign by opponents to damage his character and legitimize the theft of YUKOS.

However even among the most cynical of these groups, there usually is very little debate over the absurdity of the legal process itself. Even if one is not a supporter of Khodorkovsky, it is quite difficult to explain how he can be convicted of tax evasion in one trial and then only to be charged in a second trial with having stole all the oil that this tax would have been based on. Or the guiding rationale behind mounting the false trial and hounding witnesses (such as the medical blackmail of Vasily Aleksanyan), if it were actually possible to try a real case upon real evidence. It just doesn’t withstand serious consideration, nor does it address the fact of the multi-billion dollar theft of the country’s largest oil company in the process.

Instead, many choose to look toward the decisions of Khodorkovsky himself in the years leading up to the YUKOS Affair, arguing that he “miscalculated” the situation, believed he was “untouchable” given his influence, or it had somehow otherwise been his fault for failing to understand the arbitrary, lawless reach of executive power in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

One example of this trend is featured in a recent book review by Keith Gessen in the London Review of Books – which although I believe is exceedingly fair, thorough, well written and considerate of diverse viewpoints – also falls into the blame-the-victim tendency:

Watching the interview, it’s impossible to tell whether he really cares nothing for his freedom or whether he just can’t believe he’ll be arrested. He is the richest man in Russia, one of the richest in the world. A week before he had had a meeting with Dick Cheney. That this kind of access, and prominence, can’t guarantee you immunity is hard to believe. Perhaps he really couldn’t believe it until a group of special forces, in ski masks and armed to the teeth, stormed his plane on the tarmac of a Siberian airport in October and arrested him. For the first week after his arrest, his cellmates would later report, he was in a state of shock. He refused food, lay on his cot, and seemed to be thinking `very hard about something.’

Another reiteration of the “Khodorkovsky mistake” can be seen in a recent article by Moscow journalist John Helmer (similarly to Keith Gessen’s article, the journalist clearly understands the persecutory nature of the trial, but “the mistake” is the clearest explanation of motive):

The difference [between other oligarchs and MBK] is that Khodorkovsky tried to sell his Russian oil assets to an American oil company directly, after being told at the Kremlin that he shouldn’t. Khodorkovsky made the mistake of thinking that he owned Yukos, and could do what owners think they can do. He forgot what warlords and concessionaires forget at their peril: power and wealth are the gift that keeps on giving – if you don’t want to keep on giving, run for your life.

Essentially the central conclusion of many portrayals of the case is that “he should have known better” than to trust in Russia’s judicial independence. The narrative proposes that he was “naive” when he decided not to leave Russia (though he had many chances), believing instead that because the company had rigorously paid taxes and operated in a most transparent fashion.

This line of argument is very troubling because it suggests that one should go to jail and face whatever consequence if they happen to believe in Russia and its ability to independently administer justice. An innocent person does not flee the scene of an accident in a normal rule of law country, a businessman should not assume that the government has the unacknowledged right can steal his property in broad daylight, and a patriot does not contribute to his or her nation by succumbing to the lowest forces of corruption which control it. But to commit to these principles, the conclusion suggests, is to welcome your own undoing – instead of fighting the nature of the problem itself.

At the end of the day, perhaps we are only debating details and focusing on the insignificant. Nevertheless, the core values questions provoked by the Khodorkovsky experience, and the idea that the motivation for the whole series of events somehow arose from his own mistakes. If Russia continues to feature a 19th century Tsarist property system, whereby business ownership is only allowed by permission of the state, then this had better be made clear and cut in stone before the next investor makes another tragic mistake.

Khodorkovsky believed that Russia was modernizing, open, free and fair, and that the only way this prophecy could be fulfilled was if people were to begin to treat it as such – especially through his own actions at such a critical moment. This is one vision shared identically by the current leadership, at least in their statements lauding the positive business environment, the campaign against legal nihilism, and Russia’s support for international law as the backbone of the new multilateral order.

But standing in between these two visions of what Russia should become lies this imagined “mistake” of Khodorkovsky.

By James Kimer, Guest Commentator to the Khodorkovsky and Lebedev Communications Center ___________________________________________________

(*) This commentary hits the nail on the head. So many articles that one reads these days about Khodorkovsky tend to say pretty much the same thing, to the effect that in the early stages of his career he was naive, or culpably arrogant, or in some way guilty of vague and unspecified crimes but with no real, credible evidence being produced. The reality is that he is extremely bright, and foresaw with unusual clarity that he was going to be arrested but chose not to flee (which to me inevitably recalls the choice made by Jesus Christ in the garden of Gethsemane). By his choice he declared himself to be a true Russian patriot. This makes Khodorkovsky the most honourable of political prisoners, a true hero for our times. And this is what motivates his many supporters in Russia and abroad.  JP

17:15 26/02/2010
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Friday that people suspected of
economic crimes should be released on bail more often to prevent jail being used
to pressure businessmen, as well as to cut the prison population.

“I suggest a rather high level of bail be introduced, a minimum of 500,000
rubles ($16,600) for serious crimes and 100,000 ($3,300) for smaller offences,”
Medvedev said.

Bail is rarely used in Russia, where suspects can spend two or three years in
detention pending trial. Intimidation by security forces is another problem
often voiced by Russian defense lawyers and rights groups.

Last November a lawyer representing a London-based hedge fund (*) died in a
Moscow jail while awaiting trial on tax evasion charges. Supporters say Sergei
Magnitsky was denied access to medical treatment.

The Supreme Court said earlier this month it was drafting legislative amendments
to introduce the 5,000 ruble lower bail bracket for insignificant economic
crimes and 200,000 ($6,600) for major offences. The Justice Ministry proposed
50,000 rubles ($1,600) and 250,000 rubles ($8,300) respectively.

Meeting with business leaders and the prosecutor general in his country
residence, Medvedev said higher bails and written pledges not leave town or
country during the investigation would help prevent “corrupt security officers”
from jailing entrepreneurs and seizing their companies.

“We all know of plenty of such examples. They put you in a slammer on a
competitor’s tip and let you out for money,” Medvedev said.

Medvedev also said securities and real estate could be accepted as bails.

The Russian government has moved to mitigate legislation on economic crimes. A
law banning confinement for suspected tax dodgers came into force in January
2010. Suspects who face tax evasion charges for the first time or paid their
arrears will now be able to avoid prosecution.

And parliament is considering a bill that curbs the practice of pre-trial
detention for suspects in economic crimes.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the founder of the now-defunct Yukos oil firm and once
Russia’s richest man, who is in prison on large-scale fraud and tax evasion
charges, was denied bail in 2003 and was tried behind closed doors, triggering
accusations in Russia and abroad of a politically motivated trial.

BARVIKHA, February 26 (RIA Novosti)
____________________________________________________

(*) Describing the late Sergei Magnitsky as “representing a London-based hedge
fund” is a typical bit of RIAN deceit. RIAN pretends to be objective but it is
far from being so. The history of the case makes it abundantly clear that there
was no involvement in the fraud whether as victim or otherwise by any
London-based hedge fund, and the criminal activities he was investigating were
all in Russia, where it is still clear that no action is being taken against the
criminals who masterminded the frauds. President Medvedev appears to be
powerless to act in the case. Perhaps because the ultimate beneficiaries of the
frauds include a Vladimir Vladimirovich? ….Stranger things have happened.
JP

Cell Block Four

by Keith Gessen
Vol. 32 No. 4 • 25 February 2010

The Quality of Freedom: Khodorkovsky, Putin and the Yukos Affair
by Richard Sakwa
Oxford, 426 pp, £55.00, May 2009, ISBN 978 0 19 921157 9

In Moscow, the second trial of the former oil and banking tycoons Mikhail
Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev has now been going on for nearly a year. The
trial itself, which is doggedly examining a series of esoteric and possibly
imaginary economic crimes while skating over more serious – and also possibly
imaginary – suggestions of violent criminality, has not been very interesting.
The drama of two very bright men – one of whom, Khodorkovsky, is now a political
figure of some significance – facing off against the entire apparatus of an
authoritarian state, on the other hand, has been riveting. It was always bound
to be.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky graduated from the Mendeleev Institute in Moscow in 1986,
with a degree in chemical engineering. At university he’d been deputy head of
the Komsomol, in charge of making sure other students came to Party meetings and
of excluding them if they had a bad attitude. Kicking someone out of the
Komsomol also meant kicking them out of the university; Khodorkovsky had done
that too. He was the only child of two Soviet factory workers, one of whom (his
father) was Jewish. `I realise now that my parents hated the Soviet government,’
he has said, `but they shielded me from this, thinking that to do otherwise
would be to ruin my life.’ They were right. Their son’s path to success in the
Soviet Union was through conformity; they raised him well, and he conformed.

Even if Khodorkovsky had wanted to become a dissident, he would hardly have had
time: just as he was getting out of school, Gorbachev was beginning the process
that would end up destroying the Soviet Union. Almost immediately, the insane
scramble to build Russian capitalism began. Khodorkovsky gathered together some
friends, mostly computer programmers and engineers like himself, and began doing
what the Russians still call bizness. They imported computers and bad French
brandy and took advantage of the various inefficiencies created by the fact that
the official dollar-rouble exchange rate differed from the unofficial one by 300
per cent. The late Soviet system had no real banks, and so they started one,
called Menatep. They were learning on the job. Some years ago the Moscow Times
tracked down a one-time associate of Khodorkovsky’s, a French financier, who
described what it was like to work with Menatep in the early days. They were
fantastically inventive and fantastically ignorant. The Frenchman recalled a
letter they’d composed after a consultation with the accountancy firm Arthur
Andersen. `Could you tell Mr Arthur Andersen …’ it began. Andersen, the firm’s
founder, had died in 1947. `They didn’t have a clue,’ the Frenchman said.

They got a clue pretty quickly, however, and homed in on one of their key
comparative advantages: of all the early capitalists, Khodorkovsky had the
nicest face. Like the others he was shrewd and intelligent, but he was also
quiet and polite, with a knack for winning people’s trust. One of the most
remarkable boondoggles of the late Soviet years was the conversion of the
contents of illiquid corporate accounts into real-life cash. For years
state-owned companies had been transferring huge sums of money to one another,
because what’s 100,000 roubles on some ledgers between state corporations? Well,
nothing, literally nothing, because those roubles didn’t exist. But if you spent
your evenings in the late 1980s getting a law degree, as Khodorkovsky did, you
might be able to figure out a way to turn those imaginary roubles into actual
roubles. It was alchemy, but you needed a licence to perform the alchemy, and to
get a licence you needed help from the top. The Washington Post’s David Hoffman,
in the best journalistic account of the heroic age of Russian capitalism, The
Oligarchs, found an old professor, the head of a giant research institute, who
remembered Khodorkovsky and another young man coming to him to ask for some
start-up capital. They were such nice young men, the professor recalled. He
wanted to help them. `Well, maybe I forget now,’ the professor told Hoffman.
`But it seems to me I gave them 170,000 roubles’ – that is, 170,000 roubles from
the institute’s notional coffers. This was an enormous sum of money at the time,
and you can be sure the professor was not forgotten by his protйgйs.

As the `transition’ to capitalism continued in the early 1990s, Khodorkovsky
grew increasingly powerful without growing correspondingly obnoxious. In a
country where the first thing anyone did with money was buy a tight-fitting
pin-striped Armani suit and pointy shoes, Khodorkovsky wore jeans and a
roll-neck sweater. More important, he kept his ties to power: for a while he
served in the first Yeltsin administration as a deputy minister of fuel and
energy. But soon he returned to the business world. There were many
opportunities during those years for someone who knew where to look, though the
real action for a Russian bank in the early 1990s was to take advantage of the
runaway inflation. If you had some deposits on your books – Menatep was
fortunate to be husbanding the monies of the Federal Pension Fund – you could
take your roubles, turn them into dollars, and then turn them back into (many
more) roubles in a few months. The losers – the people on the other side of that
trade, as they say in the business – were the Russian population, for whom the
price of bread went up while salaries and pensions stagnated.

The first seven or eight years of nickel-and-diming the wealth of the nation
into their pockets put Menatep and a few other banks in position for the truly
big play. This came in 1995, when Vladimir Potanin, a banker with even better
connections than Khodorkovsky’s, came up with a plan. The Yeltsin government was
rapidly running out of money. It had slashed social programmes, healthcare and
military spending, but even so it was falling behind on salaries, particularly
in the vital oil, gas and metal mining sectors. Up to this point the government
had largely been financing itself by holding the world’s largest yard sale,
selling off its many industrial assets; by 1995 all that remained were the oil,
gas and metals giants. Unfortunately, the Communists, who weren’t enjoying the
yard sale at all, were still powerful enough in the Duma to get legislation
through making it illegal to privatise the country’s richest companies. But –
this was the ingenious bit – what if the banks, the only more or less properly
capitalised institutions in the country, were to `lend’ the government the
money, with the government putting up shares in the untouchable oil and metals
majors as collateral? Perhaps the government would default on the loans (of
course the government would default on the loans!), but there was no telling
that in advance. Banks would bid for the right to loan the government money, but
in order to keep the Communists from yelling and screaming too much, foreigners
would be banned from the bidding. This would also have the useful effect of
keeping prices at a level that the Russian banks could afford.

Over the course of several weeks in late 1995, the `loans-for-shares’ auctions,
as they came to be known, fundamentally altered the ownership structure of
Russian society, handing controlling packets of the largest oil and metals
companies to a group of well-connected private bankers. Potanin got Norilsk
Nickel, the world’s largest nickel producer; Boris Berezovsky and his young
partner Roman Abramovich bought half the oil company Sibneft for $100 million
(when Abramovich sold his shares ten years later, that stake would be worth more
than $9 billion); Khodorkovsky, who was Potanin’s closest ally in the
loans-for-shares scramble, got Yukos, one of the country’s biggest oil
companies, for $350 million. His stake would be worth 20 times that in just two
years.

Loans-for-shares became the historical flashpoint for anger at the way the 1990s
privatisation was conducted. But the deeper cause of this anger was the
lawlessness that allowed a small group of people to become very wealthy while
everyone else came to fear for their lives. There was fear of famine, but famine
was averted; instead, as they saw their savings evaporate, Russians witnessed a
civil war on the streets of their cities. Before Chechnya, before Turkmenistan,
there was the war in Moscow, Petersburg and Yeltsin’s hometown of Ekaterinberg.
Well-armed gangs were at one another’s throats, and you never knew when, going
out for milk, you would find yourself in their way. A lot has been written about
the humiliation Russia experienced when it ceased to be a superpower; a lot has
also been written about the rapid immiseration of a vast segment of the
post-Soviet population. But these things were affected by the daily experience
of fear. It was certainly bad to be ruled by the senile bureaucrats of the
Communist Party, but for a lot of people it was worse to be ruled by
thick-necked thugs in tracksuits and Mercedes. It’s notable that the one work of
cinematic art to come out of Russia in the 1990s was Alexei Balabanov’s Brat
(Brother), a revenge fantasy in which a young man comes to Petersburg after
serving in Chechnya and, somewhat reluctantly, finds himself killing all the
mafiosi in town. It’s a Russian Taxi Driver, a film animated by a profound wish
to wipe the scum from the streets, born in the collective unconscious of a
social class (the emasculated intelligentsia) incapable of doing any such thing.

The connection of the future oligarchs to the crime rife in the cities is
complex. The small-time thugs who started out by shaking down old ladies selling
homemade pies on street corners did not, for the most part, end up owning the
world’s largest oil companies. Nor, for the most part, were the future oligarchs
setting up appointments for shoot-outs the following day at noon. By the
mid-1990s, the major players all had private security services headed by former
KGB generals or (as in Khodorkovsky’s case) police chiefs. But this didn’t mean
that, out in the provinces, at the furthest corners of their empires, there
weren’t still problems that were solved violently. When the anti-Yukos campaign
gathered real steam in late 2003, people began to come forward saying they’d
been followed, shot at, attacked or threatened by the Yukos security forces.
Some were clearly lying. But after a while it added up. Yet Khodorkovsky’s
gentle demeanour, his simple, down-to-earth manners, his roll-neck sweaters –
these were not a faзade. He was a nice guy. As one of his former cellmates says
in I Served Time with Khodorkovsky, a collection of interviews with fellow
prisoners which was published in Russian in 2005, the jailed oligarch always
took the top bunk, rather than the bottom one, in spite of the prison code. `But
Mikhail Borisovich, you’re in prison,’ this cellmate, Slava, would plead. `Here
respected people sleep on the bottom bunk.’ Khodorkovsky wouldn’t listen. In
another country he might have been the founder of a successful software company,
or a brilliant financier: he might have been the president of Microsoft or
Goldman Sachs.

Perhaps the best account of how a nice, educated person might have found himself
caught up in bloodshed is Yuli Dubov’s remarkable, as yet untranslated novel,
Bolshaya Paika (`The Big Slice’, 1999). Dubov was (and, in exile in London,
remains) a close associate of the most controversial of the oligarchs, Boris
Berezovsky, and the book is a fictionalised account of Berezovsky’s rise to
power. It begins with the Berezovsky character, Platon Makovsky, and all his
mathematician friends back in Soviet times: young, bright, exuberant, though
also jealous, truculent, prone to explosions. With the collapse of the USSR and
their research institute, they go into business together, their business takes
off, and one by one the old friends die. One of them is killed by a rival in
Petersburg; another commits suicide; another takes a bullet to the head that is
meant for Platon. Platon isn’t directly responsible for any of these deaths, but
indirectly he is, through his carelessness, and through the intensity with which
he does business, always raising the stakes and setting people against him.
Really, it’s the money’s fault. When so much of it is involved, people get hurt.

After winning nominal control of Yukos, Khodorkovsky and his team began the long
process of taking charge of the company and making it profitable. While they
were doing this, the Russian economy collapsed, taking Menatep with it. In the
aftermath of the collapse, in 1998, Khodorkovsky performed some unlovely
manoeuvres to mitigate the damage to his holdings: at one point a truckload of
important financial documents happened to fall into the Dubna River; at another
Khodorkovsky threatened to dilute the value of Yukos shares down to zero if
minority shareholders didn’t sell out to him at his price. But he has also said
that the crisis forced him to reconsider some of his practices. It certainly had
that effect on the country’s political class as a whole, which realised that,
like it or not, the Yeltsin administration was no longer functioning. A year
later, Vladimir Putin, a little known former KGB agent, was made prime minister,
and six months after that he became president. His first order of business would
be to deal with the oligarchs to whom Yeltsin had sold his soul.

In retrospect it’s fairly clear that no one, including Putin himself, knew what
he was going to do, or what he could do, or how far he could go. Now we know
that you can destroy a media empire simply by arresting its owner for a few
days, and sending a few busloads of masked men with automatic rifles to its main
offices. The media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky had a thousand men in his security
force, a reputation in the West as the tribune of Russia’s independent media,
and a reputation in Russia – for his repeated refusals to back down on Chechnya,
above all – as a stubborn, pugnacious independent. He seemed unassailable. In
the event, after being briefly arrested in June 2000, Gusinsky was soon on a
plane to Spain, and has not set foot on his native soil since. His former
television station, NTV, now mostly broadcasts poorly produced Russian cop
shows. Berezovsky, Gusinsky’s sometime partner and sometime rival, was soon on
his way to London, where he too has remained.

Khodorkovsky stayed put. He was feeling good – the price of oil, which in 1998
had fallen to its lowest level since 1973, was on its way back up – and he had a
lot to do. In July 2000, he attended the famous meeting of top business leaders
with Putin, at which Putin offered a deal: if the oligarchs stayed out of
politics – something Gusinsky and Berezovsky had notably failed to do – the
government would refrain from revisiting questions over loans-for-shares and the
other privatisations of the 1990s. It’s unclear what Khodorkovsky took away from
the meeting, because in the next three years he seemed to do exactly what Putin
had warned against. On the model of George Soros’s Open Society programme, which
was being pushed out of Russia, he took over the mantle of financing arts and
education with his Open Russia foundation, and on the model of Gusinsky he
started doing what he could to finance independent media. Open Russia arranged
seminars outside Moscow on writing, reporting and institution-building, in the
hope of creating the beginnings of a civil society.

At the same time, Khodorkovsky remained an aggressive businessman, furthering
his interests in the Duma and the Kremlin; he also gave money to various
political parties, including the Communists. Above all, though, he turned Yukos
into a powerful, modern oil giant. He took the company public on the London
Stock Exchange and dramatically improved its accounting practices. He brought in
Western experts to work the oilfields, improving production techniques. He also
worked, both for his own sake and the company’s, on his public image.
Khodorkovsky’s Menatep, even more than other Russian banks, had become a pariah
in the West after 1998, and between 2000 and 2003 he spent millions on public
relations, and it worked. By 2003, Yukos had surpassed Lukoil as Russia’s
biggest oil producer; its market capitalisation stood at more than $20 billion.
Forbes estimated Khodorkovsky’s personal fortune at around $4 billion, making
him Russia’s richest man – and on top of all that Yukos was paying more taxes
into the Russian treasury than just about anyone else.

He seemed to be moving in the direction Russia wanted to be moving: back into
the club of advanced nations, rather than the club of basket-case states that
lost wars to tiny mountain republics and periodically defaulted on their foreign
debts. But somehow Khodorkovsky took it all too far, or too seriously. As
Richard Sakwa describes in voluminous detail in his book on the Yukos affair,
Khodorkovsky began trying to break the government monopoly on oil pipelines,
planning an independent Yukos pipeline to China; and he also began negotiating a
huge share swap, in essence a merger, with either ExxonMobil or ChevronTexaco.
He began, in short, to believe his own press. `Khodorkovsky,’ one very sceptical
American financier told me, `was the only one of the oligarchs who forgot that
he was an oligarch, that is, a crook. He decided that because he’d stopped
stealing from the company that he was a great businessman, a builder of value!
The other oligarchs, when they saw the fuzz, knew they should run. But
Khodorkovsky forgot.’

In mid-June 2003, investigators arrested Alexei Pichugin, a former KGB major who
had become the deputy head of the Yukos security department, and charged him
with organising the murders of a number of Yukos opponents. A week after
Pichugin’s arrest, Yukos’s headquarters in Moscow were searched. And a week
after that, Platon Lebedev, now head of Menatep Group (Khodorkovsky had stepped
down in order to become CEO of Yukos), was arrested in the hospital where he was
being treated for a heart condition.

Pichugin was eventually charged with organising five killings, all of people who
were somehow in conflict with Yukos/ Menatep: an outspoken mayor of an oil town,
a woman with a little tea shop in Moscow in a building that Menatep wanted, the
bodyguard of a business rival whose car was blown up (the business rival wasn’t
in it), and a man (and his wife) who supposedly helped Pichugin plan the
killings but had become too loose-lipped. The order for the killings allegedly
came to Pichugin from Leonid Nevzlin, a senior Yukos executive and one of
Khodorkovsky’s longtime partners. On television shows about the affair he came
to be referred to as `the serial killer Nevzlin’.

Was any of this true? It’s impossible to tell. Pichugin has consistently denied
all the charges. Under questioning, he was apparently given a psychotropic drug,
and still denied the charges. His two trials did little to clarify things – the
one before a jury was closed to the press, and the one open to the press wasn’t
before a jury. Pichugin was found guilty at the jury trial, at which point the
prosecutors appealed because they thought the verdict wasn’t harsh enough. They
wanted a new trial, and got one. Witnesses changed their testimony, recanted,
added new details. Some of the key witnesses were professional criminals. In the
end, Pichugin was sentenced to life imprisonment. The thing is that the Russian
legal system is in such a state that the outcome would have been the same
whether he was innocent or guilty. The most I can say is that there are several
Russian journalists I respect who think the case was trumped up, and no Russian
journalist I respect who doesn’t.

But someone killed all those people, shot up their cars, and threw grenades
inside just for good measure. Someone – or many people, acting separately –
spilled a lot of blood during the 1990s, and we don’t know who it was. While
this was happening, someone also privatised Russia’s immense oil wealth, avoided
taxes, thereby bankrupting the government, which, since it had to finance a war
in Chechnya, and also the lifestyles of its own officials, cut back on
hospitals, so that patients, when they arrived at those hospitals, were much
more likely to die. It would certainly be simpler if the murderers and the
privatisers were one and the same.

This is the line that Putin has taken. Whenever he’s asked about Khodorkovsky –
and he is almost always asked about Khodorkovsky when he meets with a foreign
delegation or with a delegation of Russian liberals – he says that Khodorkovsky
is in prison because he and his people were found guilty of various crimes, `up
to and including murder’. (In France recently he compared Khodorkovsky to Al
Capone – pointing out that Capone, in the end, had been imprisoned for tax
evasion rather than his more heinous crimes.) It’s a point often lost in Western
accounts of the case: politically, the Khodorkovsky case was sold as the
humbling not just of a man who’d become too rich, perhaps illegally, but of a
criminal organisation. The Putin regime has always based its legitimacy on its
supposed fight against the chaos and institutional collapse of the 1990s, and it
was important to connect Khodorkovsky to the very worst of those years.

But in Russia the arrest of Pichugin, say, or Lebedev, isn’t the end, or even
necessarily the beginning of the end. It’s more like the end of the beginning.
The prosecutor’s office always has a case at the ready, and at any given time a
number of such cases are `under investigation’. Sometimes they are opened at the
instigation of the Kremlin, sometimes at the instigation of a business rival.
All of this is in the nature of a negotiation: if he understands the signals, a
businessman in this position needs to start negotiating.

In the months after the arrests, however, Khodorkovsky did the opposite of
negotiate. In the autumn of 2003 he went on a barnstorming tour of the country,
speaking to student groups, checking on his philanthropic work, sharing his
thoughts on the anti-Yukos campaign with local media. He went to Berlin and
Washington, gave speeches, held meetings – and then came back. In Moscow,
outside the police station after questioning by investigators, he announced that
he wouldn’t run away. `If their intention is to get me to leave the country or
put me in jail, then they should put me in jail,’ he said. `I’m not going to be
a political exile.’

On 20 July, Khodorkovsky had given an interview to the tough-talking television
`news’ show Moment of Truth. By then it was already clear he was going to be
arrested. The video – available on YouTube – is difficult to watch. Khodorkovsky
is very calm and pleasant, as always; he speaks softly, as always; and he puts
particular emphasis on the normality of things: yes, he admits, he’s had
conflicts with the government over tax policy, but that’s `normal’. He’s had
conflicts over the pipelines – also `normal’. He insists that everything is all
right.

Watching the interview, it’s impossible to tell whether he really cares nothing
for his freedom or whether he just can’t believe he’ll be arrested. He is the
richest man in Russia, one of the richest in the world. A week before he had had
a meeting with Dick Cheney. That this kind of access, and prominence, can’t
guarantee you immunity is hard to believe. Perhaps he really couldn’t believe it
until a group of special forces, in ski masks and armed to the teeth, stormed
his plane on the tarmac of a Siberian airport in October and arrested him. For
the first week after his arrest, his cellmates would later report, he was in a
state of shock. He refused food, lay on his cot, and seemed to be thinking `very
hard about something’.

The shock must have been severe, for a spirit of optimistic, strategic denial
seems to have been at the core of Khodorkovsky’s project from the very start. As
he told Hoffman, a lot of people inside the Party who saw perfectly well the
opportunities available in the mid-1980s declined to take advantage, not because
they were dull-witted or foolish, but because they remembered earlier episodes
of reform that had subsequently been cut short, with many of the reformers
landing in prison. But, Khodorkovsky told Hoffman, laughing at his good luck, `I
was too young, and I did not remember this.’ This kind of ignorance was most of
the time a blessing; eventually it led to his downfall.

Scores of journalists and human rights workers have been killed in Russia since
1991, but, fittingly for the twilight of the age of Russian capitalism, it was
two businessmen who found themselves at the centre of a show trial. Khodorkovsky
and Lebedev were not charged with the murders attributed to Pichugin and
Nevzlin; like Al Capone, they were presented with a list of economic crimes. As
with the Pichugin trial, most serious students of the case believe the charges
were bogus. Menatep and Yukos had taken advantage of various legal loopholes,
especially with regard to taxation (in particular, the use of `transfer
pricing’, where a domestic company sells its oil to an offshore affiliate at a
loss, and the offshore company then sells it for a profit); when the loopholes
were closed, they found new ones. This wasn’t very sporting (or maybe it was too
sporting), but it wasn’t illegal. That wasn’t the point, however. As we know
from Bernard Madoff and his 150-year sentence, criminal cases for economic
crimes are very much the product of a particular political conjuncture. The
Putin regime had always been eager to find a scapegoat for the 1990s; it needed
to send a message to the other oligarchs – especially at the dawn of a giant
commodities boom – on the matter of taxation; and also, as it happened,
Khodorkovsky had become a real pest with his Open Russia programmes, pipelines
to China and putative mergers. Richard Sakwa has even found someone who claims
that during a meeting with Putin, Khodorkovsky took a call on his cellphone `and
continued to talk as if the president of Russia did not exist’. (Is this what
Putin had in mind when – as Lord Browne, the former president of BP, recently
revealed in his memoirs – he said: `I have eaten more dirt than I need to from
that man’?) Best of all, perhaps, once the case got going the authorities were
able to start landing Yukos with enormous tax bills, in the tens of billions of
dollars, effectively bankrupting the company so that it could be taken over by
Rosneft, run not by a group of Jews but by Igor Sechin, a cabinet minister, a
friend of Putin, and by all appearances himself a former KGB man. As for
Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, they would both be sentenced to nine years (later
reduced to eight) in penal colonies. The `serial killer’ Nevzlin was also tried,
in absentia, but he had long since fled to Israel.

And as the government seemed to be reading from an old script, of tsarist or
Bolshevik vintage, so too, to everyone’s surprise, did Khodorkovsky. Despite his
background in the Komsomol; despite nearly two decades of non-stop work, first
in finance and then in oil; despite his quiet, somewhat aloof personal manner,
as soon as he ran into trouble Khodorkovsky began, perfectly naturally it
seemed, to follow the traditional course of Russian resistance. He refused to
run, he refused to sell out his friends, he refused to back down. He tried to
save his fortune just before his arrest, by putting his several billion dollars’
worth of Yukos shares in the keeping of Jacob Rothschild in London. (Despite his
efforts to protect his interests, Yukos shares eventually declined to $.02
before trading on them stopped in 2006.) Above all, like just about every
Russian ever placed in jail, he began to write.

According to his former cellmates, after Khodorkovsky recovered from the shock
of his arrest and began eating food again (mostly yoghurt), he got to thinking.
The result was an epistle, a kind of historical cri de coeur about what had gone
wrong in the 1990s, and why. Published in the business newspaper Vedomosti in
2004, five months after his arrest, `The Crisis of Russian Liberalism’ was not a
reply to his persecutors but a full-scale assault on his only supporters:
post-Soviet Russian liberals. `Today Russian liberalism is in crisis,’ he began.
`Of this there can be very little doubt.’ In some detail and without pulling any
punches – at times spilling over into outright nastiness – the essay examined
the catastrophe of the liberals in a way that even six years later most other
liberals have refused to do. `Those whom fate and history chose to be the
vessels for liberal values in our country were not up to the task,’ Khodorkovsky
wrote:

We need to admit this now in all honesty. Because the time for kidding ourselves
is past – and from Cell block No. 4, where I now sit, I can see this better,
perhaps, than those residing in more comfortable chambers … We need to analyse
our tragic mistakes and admit our guilt. Our moral and historic guilt.

There was immediate argument about the letter’s authorship, with some people
claiming that the Kremlin made him write it, or had it written for him by a
shady journalist. (I once asked the journalist in question if he’d written the
letter, and he said: `If I told you I didn’t, you wouldn’t believe me anyway.’)
From a strictly literary perspective, the letter is puzzling: accusing liberal
activists of trying to make money out of politics, for example, sounds rather
odd coming from Russia’s richest man; and some of the vocabulary – the word
`discourse’, for example – seems oddly high-flown. Sakwa takes the authorship
question seriously and concludes that Khodorkovky did write the letter; and in I
Served Time with Khodorkovsky, his cellmates describe Khodorkovsky reading
`Crisis’ aloud to them and trying especially to make sure that the only one of
them without a university education, Slava, understood it. `You’re the educated
one, you write it,’ Slava would say, to which Khodorkovsky would reply: `That’s
exactly why I want you to understand it.’ The following may not count as
evidence, but I heard Khodorkovsky read some of his declarations to the court
this past spring and summer, some merely procedural, others more general and
philosophical, which he had composed the night before, and it was clear from the
pride with which he delivered them that he believed them to be witty, sharp and
utterly devastating. (They weren’t bad, especially in the circumstances.) He
had, in short, the vanity of the author. In Russia, a CEO is more than a CEO.

Khodorkovsky’s next epistle was called `Prison and the World: Property and
Freedom’. It was more personal than the first. He began by addressing the case
against him, calling it a banal attempt on the part of one Kremlin faction to
seize his oil company. He claimed that he, for his part, did not find it so
unbearably difficult to part with his riches: property, the very basis of the
post-Soviet experiment in freedom, the very guarantor of freedom, was also, he
had found, an impediment to freedom. Before he went to prison, he wrote, `there
were many things I could never say, because speaking openly could have harmed my
property.’ This was the `tyranny of property’. `Now,’ he went on, `I appear in a
different capacity. I have become an ordinary person (from an economic point of
view, a member of the upper middle class) for whom the main thing is not his
possessions, but his being. Who struggles not for property, but for himself, for
the right to be himself.’

This was his best letter, and there have been several others since, as well as
diary entries about prison and long exchanges with some of Russia’s most famous
writers (which are published in such places as the Russian Esquire, GQ and the
literary journal Znamya). Not quite yet a Gramsci, Khodorkovsky has nonetheless
moved to the left, producing three consecutive epistles calling for a `left
turn’ in Russian politics. He’s offered his opinion on the root causes of the
financial crisis, as well as what Russia ought to do (think ahead). More than
anything, though, in his letters he has remained visibly alive and engaged. It’s
one thing to hear about what’s happening to Khodorkovsky in prison – at one
point he was attacked with a knife by his cellmate, clearly an agent
provocateur, who then accused him of homosexual advances – but it’s another to
read him. Who among the other oligarchs has faced down such a situation? Who
among them could have?

Khodorkovksy and Lebedev’s second trial began on 31 March last year, and has
been dragging on slowly since then. This time the two men are charged with
stealing all the oil produced by Yukos between 1998 and 2003 – approximately 300
million tons – and then of failing to pay approximately $30 billion in taxes on
it. No one doubts that the verdict in this case, when it eventually comes, will
be delivered from on high, without much reference to the facts. Not only do the
charges overlap with some of the previous charges (an `odd’ circumstance, as
Obama pointed out before his recent visit to Moscow), but some are so absurd as
to be almost metaphysical. This is, of course, partly the point. Since his
arrest six years ago the state has been trying to explain to Khodorkovsky that
it can do with him what it chooses, under any pretext it chooses. His refusal to
understand this simple fact has been, for six years, one of the central dramas
of Russian political life.

For the Kremlin, this drama has long outlived its usefulness: Yukos is gone; tax
collection across the oil and gas sector has improved; and whatever funny
thoughts might have taken up residence in the heads of the other oligarchs over
the years have been decisively swept out. `He was the richest man in Russia!’ a
person close to one of Russia’s current richest men recently said to me, as
amazed six years later as if it had happened yesterday. `And still they arrested
him.’ The Kremlin, in other words, has made its point, but the Khodorkovsky
affair, like the Second Chechen War, just keeps going.

What Russia needs most: Civil society engagement, not appeasement

Ignoring the worst abuses and empowering authoritarians means betraying our
friends in Russia – and undermining US leadership around the world.

By Ariel Cohen / February 10, 2010

Washington
The Obama administration’s Russian “reset button” continues to malfunction.

The latest ignominy was a meeting last month between Russia and the United
States designed by presidents of both countries to reset relations and explore
new opportunities for partnership. Two days after the US-Russia Bilateral
Presidential Commission’s Civil Society Working Group’s ineffective meeting,
Moscow police dispersed a demonstration to support the right of assembly
provided by the Russian Constitution and arrested one-third of the participants.

The US State Department issued a feeble “concern.”

Ignoring the worst abuses and empowering authoritarians means betraying our
friends in Russia – and undermining US leadership around the world. Human rights
and civil society have to remain part of the bilateral relationship.

Last summer, the Kremlin and the White House created the Commission to expand
bilateral cooperation. Two government officials co-chair the Civil Society group
(nongovernmental organizations are not members). At its first meeting, it tamely
discussed child abuse, corruption “in the US and Russia,” and “fighting mutual
stereotypes.”

The American co-chair, Michael McFaul, senior director at the National Security
Council, is a Stanford professor and a democracy expert. Mr. McFaul knows Moscow
and its democracy movement better than anyone in the Obama administration.

He also knows what Prime Minister Putin, and the Medvedev administration, are
doing to that movement. But the White House went out of its way to make the
Russians feel welcome – and feel welcome they did. The Moscow media hailed the
meeting as a “dialogue of the equals.”

But it can’t be so: Russia is at the bottom of the Transparency International
corruption index. Russia is also classified as a “mostly unfree” economy: the
143rd on The Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal’s “Index of Economic
Freedom,” above Vietnam but behind Haiti. Yet the discussion focused equally on
corruption there and in the US. Conservative estimates put the number of
Russia’s homeless children at over 2 million. Yet the group spent time
discussing child abuse, which is on the decline, in America.

Indeed, anti-Americanism seems to be Russia’s state policy, as the Kremlin pays
for movies, TV shows, books, articles, and blogs lambasting America.

Even more important were things absent on the group’s agenda. Absent from
discussion were the murders of journalists and human rights activists such as
Anna Politkovskaya of the Novaya Gazeta; barriers to political party activities;
and pervasive censorship in the media.

Also off the menu: a political diktat in courts, which Medvedev denounced;
out-of-control police who shoot innocent civilians weekly, according to Russian
human rights organizations and the media; the interrogators who tortured and
murdered Sergey Magnitsky and a lawyer for the British firm Hermitage Capital in
the infamous Butyrki jail. The list is long, the omissions deliberate to make
Russia comfortable.

As the famous Russian prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky said, “Where will Russia be
heading in the next decade? Certainly, a political economy based upon the export
of raw materials and corruption can enjoy a certain longevity, so long as there
is stable demand for both.”

Mr. Khodorkovsky’s plight symbolizes what’s wrong with Russia’s necrotic
“justice” system. Once the founder of the most transparent oil company,
Khodorkovsky was sentenced to nine years for alleged tax evasion, and his
company taken away by the state. Today, he’s facing what the majority of Russian
and Western legal experts consider a kangaroo court on trumped-up charges.
Khodorkovsky has become one of the many proverbial canaries in the Russian coal
mine of legal abuse.

Adding Russian insult to American injury was the Jan. 31 demonstration by 300
democratic activists on the Triumphalny Square in the center of Moscow. Their
aim: to uphold Article 31 of the Russian Constitution, which guarantees freedom
of assembly.

The Moscow police detained and brutally beat the demonstrators – sending a
message that to some siloviki (men of power), the civil society dialogue with
the US means nothing. Among those detained: the former First Deputy Prime
Minister Boris Nemtsov; the Sakharov Prize laureate and the head of Memorial
human rights organization, Oleg Orlov; and many others. A month earlier, the
hallowed Lyudmila Alexeeva, the 82-year-old leader of the Moscow Helsinki Group,
was similarly detained.

Granted, the Obama administration is facing a challenging relationship vis-а-vis
Moscow, which includes negotiating the START Treaty, Afghanistan resupply
transit problems, and UN sanctions against Iran, to name a few.

Yet, the US has to develop and implement an engagement strategy promoting
freedom and human rights in Russia.

We should use every tool in our public diplomacy toolbox, such as international
broadcasting, including creating a new satellite TV channel. Social media and
revamped exchange programs should be a part of such as strategy. And US and
European counterparts should stress engagement with the Russian civil society,
including NGOs and political forces supporting transparency, markets, the rule
of law, and political pluralism.

Ariel Cohen, PhD, is a senior research fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies
and International Energy Policy at the Katherine and Shelby Cullom Davis
Institute for International Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

http://jbspins.blogspot.com/2010/02/documentary-fortnight-10-vlast-power.html
by Joe Bendel

Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Documentary Fortnight ‘10: Vl
ast (Power)

Over 200 former employees and directors of Yukos, the Russian oil company, have
been in some way persecuted by the Putin regime. Unquestionably, the biggest
fish among them is Yukos’s former CEO, the visionary Russian entrepreneur
Mikhail Khodorkovsky. At one time the sixteenth richest man in the world,
Khodorkovsky now resides in a tiny prison cell. How he got there is a chilling
story of the not-so-new Russia, compellingly recounted in Cathryn Collins’s
Vlast (Power), which screens during MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight 2010 (trailer
here).

Collins never confuses Khodorkovsky with a choirboy. She makes it very clear
Khodorkovsky’s early years are still shrouded in mystery and unsettling rumors.
However, she gives him credit for taking on the decrepit Yukos state enterprise
at time when the price of oil was at an all time low, eventually turning around
the company, making billions in the process.

Khodorkovsky was one of the original so-called oligarchs who largely reaped the
benefits of Yeltsin’s privatization plan. Yet, he was a crony capitalist of a
different color, becoming a prominent philanthropist and advocate of democracy
in Russia. He also started championing corporate transparency, only to find
himself behind bars shortly thereafter.

First-time documentarian Collins is admirably even-handed in her profile of
Khodorkovsky, never overstating her case or simply appealing to emotion. While
giving the incarcerated mogul credit for his business acumen, she is most
impressed by his ability to identify and recruit smart, talented young people
for his team. Of course, the implications of his story are clear. If a man with
an estimated net worth over fifteen billion dollars is not safe in Putin’s
Russia, nobody is.

Many of Vlast’s on-camera interview subjects participated at not inconsiderable
risk to their well being. In doing so, they definitely convey an unvarnished
sense of life in Russia today. Providing clear and concise historical
background, Vlast provides the proper context for non-Russophiles and
non-Russophobes to appreciate Khodorkovsky’s story. Still, given the long
history of Russian and Soviet anti-Semitism, the question of whether
Khodorkovsky’s Jewish heritage has contributed to his persecution is strangely
never really explored.

Vlast joins the growing ranks of valuable documentaries doggedly raising alarms
about the lawlessness of the Putin regime. Unfortunately, previous related films
like Eric Bergkraut’s Letter to Anna and Andrei Nekrasov’s Poisoned by Polonium
have largely fallen on deaf ears in the West. Given its reasoned tone and access
to Khodorkovsky’s inner circle, Vlast should impress viewers concerned about the
current state of the world. Highly recommended, it screens again tomorrow (2/24)
as Documentary Fortnight continues at MoMA.

Labels: Documentary, Documentary Fortnight ‘10, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Putin
Regime

Stifling free media, arresting journalists, bullying its neighbours – Moscow is
stamping on freedoms and the EU turns a blind eye

Garry Kasparov

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 February 2010 12.06 GMT

In the capitals of European democracies, leaders are hailing a new era of
co-operation with Russia. Berlin claims a “special relationship” with Moscow and
is moving forward on a series of major energy projects with Russian energy giant
Gazprom, one of which is led by the former German chancellor Gerhard Schrцder.
Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi traveled to St Petersburg late last
year to join in the celebration of his “great friend” Vladimir Putin’s 59th
birthday. And in Paris, negotiations are under way for a major arms sale that
would allow Russia to acquire one of the most advanced ships in the French navy.

At the same time, democratic dissent inside Russia has been ruthlessly
suppressed. On 31 January, the Russian government refused to allow the peaceful
assembly of citizens who demonstrated in support of … the right to free
assembly, enshrined in article 31 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation:
the right “to gather peacefully and to hold meetings, rallies, demonstrations,
marches and pickets”.

Likewise, Russian journalists have been increasingly harassed for expressing any
criticism of the government. But prosecution is hardly the worst outcome for
Russian journalists who fail to report the news in a “patriotic” manner. In
2009, more than dozen of journalists, human rights activists and political
opponents were killed.

Having stifled internal criticism of its policies in the Caucasus, the Russian
government is now turning its attention to those who criticise them from abroad
– and it is being abetted in this project by European businesses and
governments. The last victim of Moscow’s censors and their western friends is
called Perviy Kavkazskiy (First-Caucasian). This young Russian-language
television station was, until the end of January, freely available to people
living in Russian-speaking areas. Now, Eutelsat – the leading European satellite
provider based in Paris – has taken the channel off the air and refuses to
implement the contract negotiated with the TV.

It seems the Russian company Intersputnik made Eutelsat an offer it couldn’t
refuse on 15 January, holding out the possibility of millions of dollars in
business with the media holdings of Russian gas giant Gazprom on the condition
that Eutelsat stop doing business with First-Caucasian. Eutelsat capitulated and
sent a disastrous message to the world: no Russian-language television that is
not controlled by the Kremlin will be allowed to be aired in the Russian
Federation. Even if it is based abroad. Even if it has a contract with a
European satellite provider.

The English-language satellite channel, Russia Today, funded and controlled by
the Russian government, did not face such problems with European satellites.
This channel has recently launched an advertising blitz in the United States and
the United Kingdom featuring billboards that show the face of US President
Barack Obama morphing into that of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Nobody
raised any concerns about Russia Today and western viewers will be allowed to
receive the propaganda that is broadcasted in Russia. But the very idea of an
alternative channel in Russian language seems too “provocative” to some
Europeans.

Eutelsat’s collaboration with these policies is a clear violation of the spirit
of the EU laws protecting freedom of the press, and French courts may well find
that the firm violated more than just the spirit of the law as the case against
Eutelstat unfolds in the coming weeks. Still, this is just the latest example of
European complicity in the Kremlin’s consolidation of political power inside the
country and its reconstitution of the military used to coerce those nations that
lie just across the border.

This is the context in which came recent reports that the French government
intends to go forward with the sale to Russia of one or more Mistral-class
amphibious assault ships. The Russian military has not concealed its plan for
these weapons. In September of last year, the Russian admiral Vladimir Vysotsky
triumphantly declared that “a ship like this would have allowed the Black Sea
fleet to accomplish its mission [invading Georgia] in 40 minutes and not 26
hours”.

Only a little more than a year ago, as Russian tanks occupied parts of Georgia,
Nato secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer declared that there could be “no
business as usual with Russia under present circumstances”. Russian forces still
occupy Georgian territory, in violation of the ceasefire brokered by French
president Nicolas Sarkozy, and yet Nato, too, is back to business as usual with
Putin’s regime.

As Moscow shuts down opposition newspapers, arrests journalists who fail to toe
the government line and bullies its democratic neighbours into submission, some
European leaders are not silent. Instead they are arguing for closer ties to
Moscow, for energy cooperation, for military for arms deals.

European leaders must take a stand for freedom of speech and in defence of the
free media that enables it. This starts by making clear to European companies
that they are not supposed to be the obedient tools of the Kremlin’s censorship.
The same leaders should also show that, at the beginning of the 21st century,
one cannot occupy a foreign territory without consequence. It clearly does not
imply selling weapons to occupation forces. At stake is not only the freedom of
Russian citizens, but also the very meaning and the honour of Europe.

• The following people endorse this article: Elena Bonner-Sakharov; Konstantin
Borovoп, chairman of the Party for Economic Freedom; Vladimir Boukovsky, former
political prisoner; Natalia Gorbanevskaia, poet, former political prisoner;
Andreп Illarionov, former adviser to Vladimir Putin; Garry Kasparov, leader of
United Citizens Front; Serguei Kovaliev, former minister to Boris Yeltsin;
Andreп Mironov, former political prisoner; Andreп Nekrasov, filmmaker; Valeria
Novodvorskaya, leader of Democratic Unity of Russia; Oleg Panfilov, TV
presenter; Grigory Pasko, journalist, ecology activist, former political
prisoner; Leonid Pliouchtch, essayist, former political prisoner; Alexandre
Podrabinek, journalist, former political prisoner; Zoпa Svetova, journalist;
Maпrbek Vatchagaev, historian; Tatiana Yankelevitch, archivist, Harvard; Lydia
Youssoupova, lawyer

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