#5 - JRL 8144 - JRL Home
From: "Nick Holdsworth" <nickh007@online.ru>
Subject: Khodorkovsky....no great surprise
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004
Re: Khodorkovsky's about turn

It happened sooner than I thought, but rather than viewing Khodorkovsky's about turn in the light of 'a deal has been done', I'm more inclined to regard this as 'the deal has been presented'.

Friends, Russian and British, have teased me over recent months for advancing, poker-faced, my Khodorkovsky 'deep conspiracy theory'.

Don't mistake this for serious analysis, but it goes like this: Why is Khodorkovsky so happy in jail? Why is he always smiling so much? Surely it's not all those fancy yoghurts his wife has been sending in to make life behind bars more bearable?

No, Khodorkovsky is so happy because he is playing a role agreed with Putin way back last year.

Khodorkovsky is no fool. He knows what happened to Gusinsky and Berezovsky. He watched as Abramovich fled to London to buy up 'Chelski'.

And yet he puffed out his chest and played tough until his gunpoint arrest at an airport in deepest Siberia.

Sure, he was roughed up a bit. At least that's what the paper's said. Sure, his US-born lawyer cried foul and make big about Putin's slide towards the bad old days.

Khodorkovsky stayed silent. Putin said nowt. The great mass of poor, down-trodden Russians cheered. Another one bites the dust. Putin's KGB cronies congratulated themselves on what their man in the Kremlin was doing.

Putin is re-elected with a landslide. Two weeks later Khodorkovsky cuddles up and starts talking 'respect'.

Now, here's the bit at which friends always start snorting disbelief. You may too.

It's all gone smoothly according to plan. Khodorkovsky agreed to play the fall guy. Putin won his second term. Khodorkovsky's dreams of power post-2008 are not Putin's real problem. Putin's real problem is how to move beyond the forces that helped bring him to power and keep him in power and begin to engineer the emergence of the sustainably strong economy he clamis he wants. Many of those around him have mindsets that get in the way of this. Putin, a true son of St Petersburg - and yes, a Russian patriot - wants a window on the west, economically at least.

Cue rehabilitation of business with Khodorkovsky's humbling and subsequent re-emergence as a pro-Putin figure.

The rest of Putin's second term is about loosening the bonds of his current clique and encouraging a more compliant Russian business community into delivering the economic miracle - or at least the beginning of it - for enough ordinary Russians to guarantee Putin's place in history.

And if Khodorkovsky continues to be a good boy his dreams of 2008 may not be so far off course.

Nick Holdsworth
Times Higher Education Supplement
Moscow Correspondent.