The Russia Conundrum

NOTES

  1.  Nowadays this claim may be debatable, but the National Health Service remains undoubtedly better than anything in Russia outside of Moscow.

  2.  Potemkin villages are as old as the times of Catherine the Great. When Catherine came to inspect the newly conquered Crimea in 1787, the province’s governor (and Catherine’s former lover) Grigory Potemkin was desperate to impress her. There is a historical story – perhaps true and perhaps not – that in order to disguise the reality of poverty and destitution, he built fake villages consisting solely of wooden facades that could be erected along her route, hastily dismantled and then reassembled further on as if they were additional examples of the region’s prosperity. In the same way that Gorbachev created his own Potemkin village for Thatcher, Putin is doing the same, on a grand scale, to show off to the Russian people and the West – an idea I will address later, in chapter 15.

  3.  The first incarnation of the Bolshevik secret police after the 1917 revolution was called the Cheka.

  4.  People in the West have a fairly uniform view that the Cheka, the OGPU, NKVD, KGB and FSB are a bad thing – run by sinister thugs, dedicated to repressing the Russian people and sowing evil abroad. But that is not how many Russians view them. For every Russian who reviled the KGB, there was another who admired them. My generation was brought up on tales of Soviet secret agents carrying out daring missions to protect the motherland; and in many instances, their missions were directed against the malevolent forces of the capitalist West. An iconic television programme of 1973 called Seventeen Moments of Spring depicted a Soviet intelligence agent fighting not just against the Axis powers, but battling at the same time to stop Britain and the USA joining forces with the Nazis to undermine the USSR. Another James Bond-like spy series, The Shield and the Sword, was instrumental in inspiring a young Vladimir Putin to volunteer for the KGB.

  5.  Unfortunately, I did not realise the full extent of Putin’s mendacity until I was already in jail. Only then did it become clear that this was not just a personal battle between us over the issue of Kremlin corruption – a battle in which I alone was at risk of ruin – but a fight on a national scale, in which Putin was willing to inflict irreparable damage on the nation’s economy by destroying Russia’s most successful company in order to hand it over as a gift to his cronies.

  6.  I heard this from my former business associates, who conveyed the information to my lawyers when I was already in prison. They got their information from Vladislav Surkov in the presidential administration, who had heard it at first hand.

  7.  Medvedev response: “Медведев о фильме Навального: это попытка добиться шкурных целей”. ria.ru (in Russian), 4 April 2017.

  8.  I learned this from the words of one of Putin’s friends, conveyed to me by my lawyers when I was already in jail.

  9.  Three years later, at a farcical parole hearing, the commandant told the judge that he’d been ‘instructed to put Khodorkovsky in strict confinement’, but that the prisoner ‘kept complaining and getting the courts involved’.

10.  I should note that a year later, the chairman of that court got a summons to go to Chita to appear before the President’s personal representative, who accused him of having ‘helped a state criminal’ and fired him shortly afterwards. My local lawyer told me the story – in a town of just 50,000 inhabitants, there aren’t many lawyers and they all talk to each other.