Khodorkovsky likely to steer clear of politics

Russia’s former richest man Mikhail Khodorkovsky is likely to stay out of the nitty-gritty of Russian politics following his decade-long prison ordeal but could still exercise a degree of moral authority.
With the extraordinary military-style transfer from prison in a remote region of northern Russia to Berlin shrouded in secrecy, it is still unclear when Khodorkovsky will return to his homeland or even if he ever plans to go back. While chief executive of the Yukos oil giant that he built up through the shady privatization deals of the 1990s, Khodorkovsky began to finance opposition to President Vladimir Putin and to boldly criticize his rule.
Yet it is highly improbable that Khodorkovsky, in the short term at least, could become a political leader for the Russian opposition which has lost momentum since rocking Putin with mass protests in the winter of 2011-2012.
“Mikhail Khodorkovsky will most likely take part in civil society,” said Nikolai Petrov, professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. “He is going to be much less a political figure than he was in prison. There he was a political prisoner and the personification of the arbitrariness of the regime.”
“But as a free man he will have neither the possibility nor desire for political activity,” he added.
Khodorkovsky was twice convicted of financial crimes in trials his supporters always claimed were set up by Putin to eliminate a potentially dangerous foe. His 10 years of the remorseless prison routine in penal colonies from Siberia to Karelia have changed Khodorkovsky, who at the time of his arrest in 2003 was still known as a ruthless capitalist operator. While in prison he read voraciously and penned a series of articles for Russian and international press in an elegant style he had clearly worked to refine.
The head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, the veteran rights campaigner and Soviet-era dissident Lyudmila Alexeyeva, said Khodokovsky could become a “spiritual leader” for Russian society, as the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Vaclav Havel had been for theirs.
But Chris Weafer, senior partner at Macro Advisory in Moscow, said Khodorkovsky’s survival of 10 years in Russian prisons “will go a long way to rehabilitate his previously poor image with the Russian people.”
German analyst Alexander Rahr, one of the few people who met Khodorkovsky after his arrival in Germany on Friday, said that it was unlikely he would get involved in politics. He compared Khodorkovsky to the late Soviet dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn who was forced out of the USSR in 1974 but kept up writing about the horrors of the Gulag in exile. “You know what role he will have? Maybe I am exaggerating. But he could start the path of Solzhenitsyn,” Rahr told the RTVi Russian private television channel.
Khodorkovsky was first detained in 2003 in the early years of Putin’s rule while Russia was enjoying stellar oil-fueled growth and before the Internet had made deep inroads into Russian society.
The opposition movement is now unrecognizable from then, with different figureheads and the Internet now the main tool for communicating its message. The plight of Khodorkovsky was mentioned at times during the mass street protests against Putin but his imprisonment in no way became a banner cause for those demonstrating on the streets.
Russia’s main protest leader Alexei Navalny, who was convicted but not jailed this year in an embezzlement case that many saw as a political set-up, was a young lawyer and unknown local politician when Khodorkovsky was arrested.
In his first reaction to Khodorkovsky’s release, Navalny hailed the “astonishing dignity” he showed while in detention but eschewed any mention of his release as a landmark moment.