In from the cold

 by A.O. | BERLIN

A dark navy suit, a white shirt and a tie sit awkwardly on Mikhail Khodorkovsky as though his slightly slouched body is still fighting these garments. Meeting a small group of Russian-speaking journalists, including your correspondent, at Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin, he is still adjusting to normal sensations, as someone who walks in from the cold and dark into a brightly lit and overheated room. Thirty-six hours earlier Mr Khodorkovsky, a former tycoon who became Russia’s most famous political prisoner, was still inside Penal Colony Number Seven, in Korelia, the north west of Russia, where he was serving his second jail term. The first one was in Siberia. His imprisonment lasted ten years altogether.

“I am glad to see you all. Since most of you I met ten years ago, for me this [meeting] is a bridge to freedom,” he says quietly with a smile. Mentally, he still seems on the other shore, in a different world closed to most people in the room, where his personal space was shrunk to a minimum, where his every move was followed by video cameras and where time stopped—or expanded—infinitely. He speaks quietly and meaningfully, weighing every word and testing it for it true value and accuracy and sincerity. “I certainly earned the right not to say what I don’t think”. He sounds tough, but not angered and not broken.

“I was trying to look at my situation as a challenge. OK, enemy forces got me. So, the situation is grave. But it also offers some opportunities.” He used this opportunity to the full—reading, writing, reviewing the values of his life and the fate of his country. He went in as a business tycoon who had crossed President Vladimir Putin. He came out as one of the most significant and dignified figures in modern Russian history.

Choosing Checkpoint Charlie—which symbolised the East-West divide—as the venue for his first public appearance heightened the sense of history, even though this was hardly necessary. Many Russian dissidents came here, including Elena Bonner, the wife of Andrei Sakharov. The portraits of Sakharov and Nelson Mandela decorate the walls of the room. Above Mr Khodorkovsky’s head in big letters is printed one of the articles of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”. In 2003, when Mr Khodorkovsky was arrested, such company would have seemed absurd. Ten years on, it looks natural, largely thanks to his own courage and dignity.

Museums usually deal with history. But in the Checkpoint Charlie Museum history was unfolding in the present: Mr Khodorkovsky spoke to journalists next to a room which was dedicated to his time in jail. Mr Khodorkovsky’s main press conference, was broadcast on a screen at the entrance to the museum, turning into an instant artefact. Ordinary visitors watched it in real time before examining other things on display, including a hand-written copy of his “last word” given at the end of his shameful show-trial in 2010 in a Moscow court room, now displayed in a special glass case.

A timeline on the wall of the museum ends with October 25th, 2013—the tenth anniversary of Mr Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment. “He has been unlawfully locked up in Russia’s prisons and camps” serving “the longest sentence ever imposed on political prisoners in Russia”, the timeline reads. On December 20th, “has been” turned into “was”. The way in which it happened was in keeping with "the best traditions of the 1970s", Mr Khodorkovsky drily notes. He says he was woken at 2am on December 19th, several hours after Mr Putin stunned journalists in Russia and the world with his casual remark to the cameras that he was planning to pardon Mr Khodorkovsky. He was taken to the nearest town and put on a plane to St Petersburg, where he was transferred onto a private German aircraft that waited for him on the tarmac, and flown to Berlin. “The convoy left only when the aircraft door closed behind me,” he says.

This cold-war style operation was the result of two-and-a-half years' work by Hans Dietrich Gensher, the 86-year-old former German foreign minister who oversaw the reunification of Germany. His mission to broker Mr Khodorkovsky's pardon was supported by Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who had regularly raised the subject of Mr Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment with Mr Putin. Mr Gensher held two meetings with Mr Putin over the time. He also was in contact with Mr Khodorkovsky, mostly through his lawyers. The idea was first raised under Dmitry Medvedev, who stood in for Mr Putin as Russia’s president from 2008-12. But the Kremlin demanded that Mr Khodorkovsky admit his guilt.

This, Mr Khodorkovsky says, was unacceptable not because it was a lie—most things in his case were—but because it would have put people who worked for Yukos, his oil company, at risk of prosecution as part of a conspiracy. Those who had fled abroad could have been extradited. “I could not take it upon myself,” he says.

But sometime in November a new formula was agreed: Mr Khodorkovsky would write a letter asking for clemency and mentioning his mother’s deteriorating health, but there would be no admission of guilt. Mr Khodorkovsky would also ask Mr Putin to allow him to leave the country and travel to Germany, where his mother was undergoing treatment at the time. That way, it would be less like an expulsion from the country—which it effectively was—but an act of mercy on Mr Putin’s part. On November 12th Mr Khodorkovsky wrote a letter to Mr Putin, asking for pardon without any mention of his guilt. He also wrote another letter to Mr Putin, telling him that he has no intention of getting into everyday politics and would not fight for the return of Yukos’s assets, which have been expropriated by the Kremlin.

It appears that Mr Kodorkovsky’s being prepared to leave Russia was one of the main reasons for swaying Mr Putin’s decision to let him out of jail. Mr Khodorkovsky says he cannot return to Russia because there is a risk he would not be let out again (there is still a $550m claim against him stemming from the first case).

In the end, Mr Khodorkovsky’s release had more in common with the expulsion of dissidents—such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Vladimir Bukovsky—than it did with the return of Andrei Sakharov from exile in 1986, which signalled the seriousness of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. And as Mr Khodorkovsky says, whereas his arrest in 2003 symbolised Russia’s turn towards an authoritarian, corporatist state run by former KGB men, his release is not a symbol of the reversal of that trend. Rather, he says, “It is also a sign that Putin and some people in the Kremlin have become seriously concerned about Russia’s image. Whether this concern leads to a real change is a subject of intense fighting within the Kremlin.”

While one part of Mr Putin’s entourage is increasingly worried about Russia's worsening economic situation and its image abroad, another part believes that tightening the screws further and bringing in more repression is the only way to stay in power. The fact that it took more than a month after Mr Khodorkovsky’s letter for Mr Putin to announce his decision is one sign of the fighting between them.

In early December Russia’s deputy prosecutor started to talk on the record about a likely third case against Mr Khodorkovsky, which had "very good potential". As one person close to Mr Khodorkovsky says, this was intended for Mr Putin’s ears. But at his press conference on December 19th—the day celebrating the security services—Mr Putin put an end to it, saying a third case had no chances. He then announced his decision to pardon Mr Khodorkovsky. (Mr Putin has since also granted an amnesty to members of the Pussy Riot band). Is Mr Khodorkovsky grateful to the man who kept him in jail for ten years and released him a few months before his term was due to expire, to improve his own image?

“I was really contemplating for a long time how I would express what I feel toward Mr Putin. All these years, all the decisions in my case, were made by one person. And it would be hard to say that I am grateful to him. Let me say: I am happy about this decision. That would be the most precise,” he says. But while Mr Khodorkovsky does not intend to get involved

in a struggle for political power, it does not mean that he will not be politically active. His weight and moral authority—earned by the ten-year incarceration—are rare in today’s Russia.

And as Mr Khodorkovsky says, “The Russian problem is not just the president as a person, the problem is that our citizens in the large majority don’t understand that they have to be responsible for their own fate. They are so happy to delegate it to, say, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and then they will entrust it to somebody else, and I think that for such a big country as Russia this is the path to a dead end.” His thoughts may be as unpalatable to Russia’s opposition as they are to the Kremlin.

“The main lesson that I have drawn and I would wish that our opposition would draw the same lesson: Don’t push your fellow citizens—be they opponents, or in power, or in the opposition—into a corner. No matter what, we have to live in the same country. This is what Mandela contributed, in my opinion. That’s what I say, that’s what I write, and that is what many criticise me for. And, thank God, so be it.” /economist