After Freedom, Russian Dissident Says He Won’t Enter Politics

Freed Russian Dissident Says He Will Stay Out of Politics

By ALISON SMALE 10:13 AM ET

Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a former billionaire and critic of President Vladimir V. Putin who was imprisoned for a decade in Russia, said in Berlin that he would avoid politics but still work on behalf of prisoners.

• With Punishments or Pardons, Putin Shows He Is in Control

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky at the museum at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin on Sunday before his first news conference since his release. 

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky at the Checkpoint Charlie museum in Berlin.

By ALISON SMALE

Published: December 22, 2013

BERLIN — The setting was fraught with symbolism. In the museum at Checkpoint Charlie, the best-known crossing point along the now vanished Berlin Wall, the man who until Friday was Russia’s most famous prisoner faced reporters for the first time on Sunday and told of his last 10 years in custody and how just two days earlier he had been freed suddenly and flown here to the German capital.

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• With Punishments or Pardons, Putin Shows He Is in Control (December 22, 2013)

• Pardoned Russian Tycoon Is Free to Start Planning His Future (December 22, 2013)

• Freed Abruptly by Putin, Khodorkovsky Arrives in Germany (December 21, 2013)

The lack of rancor expressed by the former prisoner, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, Russia’s richest man until he ran afoul of President Vladimir V. Putin 10 years ago, was striking. It simply did not surface during the hour or so he spent with a small group of Russian-speaking journalists. Calm and businesslike in a dark blue suit and tie, he appeared fit and was decidedly feisty. Yet, at least for the moment, he said, he plans to stay well clear of Russian politics;will certainly not lay claim to his former oil company, Yukos, and probably will avoid Russia itself.

Asked how his unexpected liberation came about, Mr. Khodorkovsky said he had first written to Mr. Putin on Nov. 12 asking for clemency, after the former German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who spent two and a half years working on his behalf, assured him that he would not have to admit any guilt. Arrested on charges of embezzlement, Mr. Khodorkovsky became a powerful dissident voice, faulting Mr. Putin for consolidating authority and stifling dissent.

That provision of no admission of guilt proviso was crucial, Mr. Khodorkovsky insisted, not so much for himself as for all the employees of Yukos, which has since been broken up and largely reconstituted as the Rosneft company, run by the Putin ally Igor I. Sechin.

Admitting guilt, he argued, could have resulted in all employees being accused as part of a large unit of conspiracy or of committing crimes, or it could have allowed Russian authorities to seek the extradition of Yukos employees who had fled abroad.

Talk of clemency, he said, first arose, during the presidency of Dmitri A. Medvedev, a Putin ally who served one term before stepping aside last year to allow Russia’s most dominant politician to resume the office he held from 2000 to 2008.

Mr. Genscher worked behind the scenes, with the knowledge of just a few German and Russian officials, to bring off Friday’s release, he said.

Asked whether he was grateful to Mr. Putin for clemency, Mr. Khodorkovsky paused, chose his words carefully, then said: “I was really contemplating for a long time how I would express what I feel toward Mr. Putin. All these years, all decisions in my case were made by one person. And it would be hard to say that I am thankful to him. Let me say: I am happy about this decision. That would be the most precise.”

The police detained Mr. Khodorkovsky in October 2003 on his private jet in Novosibirsk, after months during which he had increasingly challenged Mr. Putin by funding opposition parties and social movements. Earlier that year, the two men had clashed publicly at a Kremlin meeting.

Mr. Khodorkovksy said that before that meeting, unidentified presidential aides had indicated he could speak frankly, even on television. But doing so set him on a path that ended in two trials and a decade in jail.

Mr. Khodorkovsky said he had no interest in entering Russian politics, “meaning the fight for power.”

“I don’t want to do it because politicians in Russia have to occupy a not-very-sincere position” he said. During all these 10 years, he said, he has earned “the right to be totally sincere, and to say what I think.” That, he added, “is higher than any politics.”

That does not mean, he stressed, that he will not be socially active, particularly on behalf of prisoners. He said he had counted himself very lucky during his incarceration because he had a loving family waiting for him, in contrast to 90 percent of prisoners he had met who had nowhere to go even if they did get out of jail.

Mr. Khodorkovsky’s departure from Russia followed so swiftly on Mr. Putin’s first word on Thursday that he might grant clemency that the prisoner ended up flying to Germany while his parents were still in Moscow, and his wife was apparently on her way there. The official reason Mr. Putin gave for his decision was that Mr. Khodorkovsky had suffered enough and needed to see his mother, who has been undergoing treatment for cancer. She had recently returned to Moscow, however, from a Berlin hospital.

The release itself, Mr. Khodorkovsky said, happened swiftly. He was summoned at 2 a.m. from his bed in the penal colony near the Finnish border where he had most recently been incarcerated and then whisked to Germany, in what he called “the best tradition of the 1970s.”

That was the only allusion he made to the Cold War, even though his meetings with the Russian-speaking reporters and a later news conference took place in a museum with extensive reminders of Soviet bloc days.

Mr. Khodorkovsky indicated that, at least for now, he would not be returning to Russia. He specifically asked to go abroad, he said. He also wrote Mr. Putin an assurance that he would not try to recover any Yukos holdings.

That decision appears to have secured the fortunes of Rosneft and Mr. Sechin. “I don’t want to waste my time on it,” Mr. Khodorkovsky said. Once worth billions of dollars, he said he did not know how much money he had left now. But, he said with a smile, “enough to live on.”

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