Khodorkovsky’s release: a view from Moscow

By Vestnik Kavkaza

The former head of the oil company Yukos Mikhail Khodorkovsky who was released after 10 years in prison at the order of President hasn’t decided on his plans to the future yet. However, Moscow doesn’t exclude that Khodorkovsky would like to become “a moral authority.”

The head of the State Duma Committee for International Affairs, Alexei Pushkov expressed the view that the release of the former head of Yukos means “serious self assurance of the Russian authorities” and “the factor of the Olympics which is often connected with the release of Khodorkovsky is not a key, if it was considered at all.”

Pushkov thinks that a human element played a big role in the release: “Khodorkovsky addressed the authorities of Russia to grant him pardon and explained reasons for this. There were no such requests before. Secondly, I think that Khodorkovsky’s release is an important step for one person, but politically speaking, I don’t think it changes something seriously. We cannot say that Khodorkovsky will deal with politics now or head the opposition movement in Russia and so on. He doesn’t show any intention to do it. It seems to me he decided to play a role of a public figure, a moral authority. And it is a result of his long imprisonment. It seems he thought a lot during these years. It was reflected in his letters, in his interviews and even in his last press conference in Berlin.”

However, Pushkov says that to be a moral authority, “one should pass a significant path because comparison with Solzhenitsyn is poor. Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to prison not due to business or operations in question. He was sentenced to prison because content of his letters was found out; he suffered for his ideas.”

According to Pushkov, Khodorkovsky has never been a prisoner of conscience: “Obviously, some Western circles want to call him a prisoner of conscience. To be a moral authority, he should estimate the period which made him a billionaire. I mean the 1990s when fortunes were scraped up in 2-3 years by difficult, ambiguous, shady and even criminal means; when the state took part in distribution of state property to certain people through absolutely non-transparent schemes, absolutely groundless parameters; when the so called loans-for-shares auctions took place, which were a way of privatization of national asset by our major oligarchy groups without compensation to the country. If Khodarkovsky gives moral and ethnic appraisal to the period of establishing the criminal bandit capitalism in Russia, then probably he could become a moral authority. The Rights and the Lefts came to one conclusion that it was the worst privatization, i.e. plunder of the national asset. But a moral authority who was raised by the epoch, who developed on the basis of the epoch, who achieved success in the epoch and who was embodiment of the epoch, should break up with the heritage. He should define his position toward the heritage.”