The Insider who fell foul of Putin
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian businessman who became Russia’s richest man, was rising fast in the capitalist free-for-all unleashed by Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and the subsequent collapse of Soviet Communism. In The Russia Conundrum Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once an oil tycoon of Yukos Oil company which has been sold piecemeal to a state rival headed by Putin crony, has seen behind the mask of Vladimir Putin, and spoke against the corruption of Putin’s regime and was punished by the Kremlin, stripped of his entire wealth and jailed for over ten years. Now freed, and pardoned by the president in 2013, working as a pro-democracy campaigner in enforced exile in London, Khodorkovsky reveals the insider’s battle to save this country’s soul. He details what has gone wrong with Putin, and maps the country’s rise and fall against Khodorkovsky’s own journey, from Soviet youth to international oil executive, powerful insider to political dissident, and now a high-profile voice seeking to reconcile East and West.
The Russian Conundrum exposes the desires and damning truth of Putin’s Russia and provides an answer to the West on how it must challenge the Kremlin. In order to pave way for a better future.
Khodorkovsky maps his life with an astute dissection of the Putin system in a polemic manner.
The Russia Conundrum offers the vengeful, nationalistic greed of the Putin circle, a story of a takeover of state power by Putin, his cronies, and the security services in the shape of the FSB, which emerged from the post-Soviet remnants of its predecessor the much-feared KGB.
The Russian government struggled to deal with an explosion of organised crime in the 1990s and turned to FSB which cut a deal with the crime barons so they could get on with their racketeering and drug trafficking in return for taking violence off the streets and sharing some proceeds with the authorities.
After a stint with KGB, Putin also got his break in this period. As deputy Mayor of St Petersburg writes Khodorkovsky, Putin was charged with liaising with his former secret police colleagues to “co-opt organised crime bosses”. Transferred to the Kremlin administration, then head of the FSB, and finally the presidency, Putin quickly packed top jobs with ex-secret service police colleagues, who were out to restore prestige, to themselves by becoming rich, as they had watched Russia’s original oligarchs do in the turbulent 1990s., to the security services that shaped them.
When Khodorkovsky, publicly accused Putin of corruption, the experiment with free-market democracy was snuffed out. Russia’s century-old struggle between westernisers who believe in openness and Slavophiles who glorify Russian nationalism, isolationism, and quasi-feudal authoritarianism.”
Russians who had seen their living standards slumped and their country humbled suffered the “ Weimar Syndrome” in the 1990s. Russia fits the description of a Third world kleptocracy. Putin’s determination to return Ukraine forcibly to the fold is merely the first step. “ If we do not stop Putin in Ukraine, he will inevitably lead us into global war” Khodorkovsky warns.
The Russia Conundrum: How the West Fell for Putin’s Power Gambit and How to Fix it by Mikhail Khodorkovsky with Martin Sixsmith, WH Allen £20, 352 pages.