SOMEBODY GET MARTHA SOME STATIONARY:

Jailed Russia Tycoon Mourns Liberty's Losses (STEVEN LEE MYERS, 3/30/04, NY Times)

Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the jailed Russian oil tycoon, published a long treatise on Monday lamenting the decline of liberal democracy here while acknowledging the part he and other business leaders played in the process during the tumultuous years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Making his most extensive public remarks since his arrest in October, Mr. Khodorkovsky also wrote in the newspaper Vedomosti that Russia's largest companies needed to recognize President Vladimir V. Putin's political authority generally and to accept higher taxes on natural resources specifically in order to legitimize the privatization deals of the 1990's.

His remarks represented an important shift in his position on at least that significant issue. Only a year ago, as chairman of Yukos Oil, he lobbied extensively against higher oil taxes in what was widely seen as a rebuff to Mr. Putin's Kremlin.

His efforts to influence politics reportedly angered the Kremlin and have been widely cited as one of the causes of the criminal investigation that has landed him and other Yukos shareholders in prison or in exile, facing what his supporters say are politically motivated charges.

Mr. Khodorkovsky's treatise broadly addressed democratization and social change as well as economic liberalization. He wrote that only by sharing with society the profits of the highly questionable privatization deals — which left a few insiders like himself fabulously wealthy — could liberalism as a political force regain the trust of ordinary Russians.

"It has to be admitted that 90 percent of the Russian people do not consider privatization fair, or those who benefited from its legal owners," wrote Mr. Khodorkovsky, whose wealth Forbes recently estimated to exceed $15 billion. He did not discuss his own privatization deals.

It is unclear whether his treatise — a time-honored tradition from Russian exiles and prisoners — will have any influence on his criminal case.

Billionaire's Letter From a Russian Prison Cell: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch who has been incarcerated for six months, may have seen the light in his
jail cell. (SERGE SCHMEMANN, 4/03/04, NY Times)

The mournful letter from solitary Confinement Cell No. 4 at Matrosskaya Tishina jail in Moscow, where the billionaire oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been incarcerated for almost half a year, is very much in the Russian tradition of Dostoyevskian remorse and repentance. In the letter, published in the newspaper Vedomosti this week, Mr. Khodorkovsky chastises Russia's liberals (himself included) for their isolation from the people; he castigates the oligarchs (himself included) for not contributing enough to Russia; he acknowledges that Russia's piratical privatization (which left him worth $15 billion) was unfair; and he declares President Vladimir Putin (who threw him in jail without charges) to be "more liberal and democratic" than most of the people he leads.

Now a cynic might think Mr. Khodorkovsky is trying to confess his way out of jail, especially since his old partner, Platon Lebedev, is about to go on trial, and most of his former supporters — Russian liberals, Western politicians, partners in his Yukos energy company, fellow oligarchs — have effectively left him to his fate.

The charges that state prosecutors released on Thursday against Mr. Lebedev are a chilling description of the devious ways in which the budding oligarchs manipulated Russia's chaos in early post-Communist years to amass and conceal extraordinary fortunes. [...]

It is possible, of course, that Mr. Khodorkovsky really has seen the light in his jail cell. He was, after all, one of the first oligarchs to transform his holdings into a model of corporate governance. It is also possible that Mr. Putin is righteous in his defense of law and order. In that case, a wise next move would be for the president to pardon the repentant thief. Russians have always had a soft spot for such stuff.

Any way you slice it, completely delegitimizing the oligarchs is a tremendous victory for Mr. Putin.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 3, 2004 7:48 AM