Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

The international news media is a curious thing.  It descends, periodically, upon a country or a region, crow-bars a story into one of its easy narratives and before any nuance can be teased from the broader detail the circus moves on elsewhere. It is left to longer form journalism and academia to stick with a story and make some sense of it. With the verdict of the Khodorkovsky trial the world’s news crews descended once again on Moscow.  Their story was already written .  A dissident prosecuted by an oppressive regime for political reasons.  An outright defeat for the rule of law and conformation of Russia‘s legal nihilism. Received wisdom is not entirely inaccurate where the Khodorkovsky case is concerned.  There is doubtless a political element to his prosecution. It is also almost certain that the oligarch is guilty of substantial and serious crimes.  When Prime Minister Putin dismisses the furore surrounding the trial, stating, ‘a thief shoul...

Received wisdom in Britain and America holds that Mikhail Khodorkovksy is a ’political prisoner‘. During one instalment of the television series ’Jonathan Dimbleby’s Russia’ the presenter drove past a gaol in which the oligarch has been imprisoned and spoke in hushed tones about the dissident opinions which apparently resulted in Khodorkovsky’s incarceration. Whereas other Russian businessmen who made their fortunes after the Soviet Union’s collapse were often brash, flashy and obnoxious, Khodorkovsky struck an unostentatious figure. With his modest roll neck sweaters and impeccable manners he is the antithesis of the cliché of the ‘New Russian‘. However the former owner of Yukos built up his wealth by the same methods as Berezovsky, Abramovich and the rest. He participated in the same smash and grab which witnessed state enterprises ending up the hands of a tiny group of opportunists for a fraction of their market value. And he built up a private security service which has bee...