The Big Steal · Fresh Air Production

The Man Who Challenged Putin

March 10, 2020·23 min·2 clips

Khodorkovsky told Putin to his face that 25% of Russians believe all officials, including Putin, are corrupt.

Host Gavin Esler opens with the series framing: the biggest theft in history, the Russian government stealing its own country's resources, with Putin as principal beneficiary. The episode focuses on 2003, when Khodorkovsky had transformed Yukos into Russia's largest taxpayer using Western management practices — McKinsey consultants, PwC accountants, international legal advisors — and was in talks with ExxonMobil and Chevron. Putin's record to that point included the Kursk submarine disaster in August 2000, in which 218 crew members died while Putin stayed on holiday and refused foreign rescue assistance, and the 2002 Moscow theatre siege, in which 200 hostages and 40 insurgents died. Putin had already made clear his approach to oligarchs by jailing media tycoon Vladimir Gusinski — whose TV channel had investigated claims that Russian intelligence staged the 1999 apartment bombings — and by driving Boris Berezovsky into exile in Britain. Khodorkovsky and the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs believed Putin had not yet decided whether to redirect wealth to his cronies or to embrace a market path. They staged a televised confrontation in which Khodorkovsky used a PowerPoint presentation to attack Kremlin corruption, citing Rosneft as an example of public money being misused. He told Putin directly that 80% of Russians believed officials were corrupt, including Putin himself. Khodorkovsky explains that he understood there was a 70% chance he would end in prison but took the risk because he saw no future for Russian business on the current trajectory. Putin had already made his decision: to make corruption the structural backbone of his governing system. Khodorkovsky distinguishes ordinary Russians, who can live without being corrupt, from the three million officials whose complicity in the corrupt system is enforced through the threat of prosecution. Anders Aslund describes the Carnegie Endowment event on October 16, 2003, where Khodorkovsky told a stunned Washington audience he believed in Russia and wanted to improve it. Privately, Khodorkovsky told Aslund that Putin was making so many mistakes he could not understand how Putin could win — a comment Aslund received with the unspoken thought that many people said the same thing in 1937. Nine days later, on October 25, armed police stormed Khodorkovsky's private jet on a Siberian airfield. He had multiple opportunities to escape to the West but chose not to, saying he could not abandon the thousands of Yukos employees still in Russia who would face prosecution. Platon Lebedev and Alexei Pichugin, his associates, had already been arrested, which had made it impossible for him to surrender and leave without appearing to abandon his staff. Scholars Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum argue that oligarchy as a system of government creates a frozen economy: all the money is concentrated at the top, bribes keep institutions compliant, and eventually everything stagnates. Snyder argues that Putin knows Russia could be richer but that the measures required — foreign investment, reduced corruption, devolved power — would threaten his regime. He notes Russia's economy is far weaker than Italy's despite Russia's vast natural resources.

As heard by us

A stark account of how a Kremlin power struggle became a lesson in control.

The piece treats Russia under Vladimir Putin as a system held together by corruption, state power, and spectacle, with Mikhail Khodorkovsky at the center.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want Russia's power struggle traced through one oligarch's ruin.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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