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Gazeta.Ru
April 1, 2004
A prisoner always has a strategy of his own
Gleb Pavlovsky, chairman of the Effective Policy Foundation, comments on Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s article published in the Russian newspaper Vedomosti on 29 March.
Written down by Ilya Zhegulev

As far as I am concerned, I was deeply touched by Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s letter, although I disagree with him on most of the points.

I was touched, because, I, too, re-adjusted my political views while in a neighboring remand centre, though it was twenty years earlier, in the times of dissidents, in the Butyrskaya prison, not in Matrosskaya Tishina [where Khodorkovsky is currently being held].

Actually, the most interesting Russian political documents have been written by prisoners ­ for instance the texts written by Nikolai Bukharin and Pavel Florensky while in prison are more interesting than the ones they wrote when free. Apparently, discomfort stimulates our lot.

Khodorkovsky’s letter is a very Russian document; it is highly likely to be misunderstood by those outside Russia. To them the article will seem downright controversial and, hence, suspicious, although from the human standpoint to me it seems interesting. It will, without fail, serve as a turning point towards some other well-considered, more circumspect line of conduct.

And in this regard I am inclined to trust the man who is looking for his path in difficult circumstances. That article does not sound like a game to me; it is too honest to be a game. Nonetheless, it does contain certain elements of a gamesmanship.

One can sense the attempts to build some kind of strategy of playing with society and with the authorities. Texts by virtually any prisoner contain elements of a game. It is inevitable.

Actually, I would be careful when considering a prisoner’s intentions. I would like to recall that Khodorkovsky today is, first and foremost, a prisoner, not a billionaire, not a major businessman.

Let us not forget that a prisoner is a kind of slave. He does not have full power over his actions. He is just not free. This ought to be kept in mind. A prisoner always has a strategy of his own, he scarcely reckons with our predilections; I think in his own way a prisoner is right.

Some ardent youth may even see that document as a manifesto, but again for a manifesto it is too honest. Khodorkovsky today is a person of far higher moral standards than any of the Russian politicians he corrupted over the years.

Indeed, to some extent it is easier to be moral in a prison cell. For me his letter is a rather interesting text, both intellectually and morally, but it can hardly be considered a manifesto.

There are many interesting points in the article. I do agree with Khodorkovsky when he writes about the cocktail of fear and comfort as a cause for the capitulation of liberals. This is one of the few absolutely direct hits. Fear and comfort incites people to the most disgusting acts. This cocktail is especially popular both with liberals and the establishment.

The article in itself is critical towards liberals, yet at the same time the author abstains from self-criticism. It is very important that Khodorkovsky admits that none other than the class of liberals have corrupted and enslaved the liberal media.

It is obviously easier to acknowledge someone else’s mistakes, and Yukos, strange though it may seem, refrained from playing with the media.

The Yukos group (at least in the 90s) did not bear any substantial responsibility for corrupting the media or the public. That was left to virtually all the other major businesses. For some reason Yukos stayed out of that. On the other hand, the group does bear substantial responsibility for corrupting politicians and public organizations, where it was extremely active.

Interestingly, Khodorkovsky has eventually distanced himself from the term “oligarchs”, although I think that those people ­ Khodorkovsky and Nevzlin ­ must share, at least partially, the responsibility for introducing that ideology for the purpose of achieving their ends in the inter-corporate struggle of the late 1990s.

The recommendations given by Khodorkovsky at the end of the article sound most doubtful. Those recommendations contain elements of political conclusions, elements of self-accusation and elements of the game; admittedly such a mixture is only natural for a prisoner’s letter.

What does he mean, for example, by “legitimizing privatization”? What privatization? There have been about half a dozen waves of privatization deals, and which of those deals should we legitimize?

Actually, this thesis has another meaning. It is time for us to recognize not so much the privatization results but the results of the new Russia with new classes and social groups, and not saying that some of those groups have no right to exist.

As soon as one of those groups is recognized as dangerous, we again enter a cycle of civil wars. That is too serious a question to conceal.

And when he says that major business should be forced to share its profits, to me it sounds like some ambiguous bargain, the parties to which are also ambiguous. When neither of the parties is clearly defined, one can assume that at the centre of the deal is bureaucracy, which will, in short, share out the spoils among its own.

In other words, that amounts to a re-distribution of property between various groups of bureaucrats. And that is not really that interesting.

At present Khodorkovsky is sitting in a prison cell awaiting his trial. Whether his trial brings about a legal bargain or quasi-legal bargain I cannot say, but there are still no independent courts in Russia ­ we all admit that. Russia has never seen an independent court.