The Russia Conundrum

INTRODUCTION

I’m a fairly calm fellow; I don’t usually get wound up about things. But I was, let’s say, concerned when I tuned in to the Moscow Echo radio station and heard that the Kremlin had put a price on my head.

‘It has been stated,’ said the radio, ‘that a bounty of five hundred thousand dollars will be paid for the capture of the former head of the Yukos Oil Company, Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky, who is currently hiding in London. The reward will be payable to any Russian citizen who brings the former oligarch back to Russia.’

The announcement didn’t quite say ‘Dead or alive’, but it came close.

This was in March 2021, after I had completed my ten years as a political prisoner in Vladimir Putin’s jails and seven years after I had been exiled to the West. My understanding has always been that serving a prison sentence – even those imposed for non-existent crimes – means the end of the matter, but that is evidently not the Kremlin’s view. Sergei Skripal had served his term and been released, but it didn’t stop Putin sending GRU killers to try to poison him, so why would I be any different? The radio announced that the bounty on my head had been promulgated by a member of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, so it was clear that it came from the top.

In functioning democracies – among which I number most Western nations – people are protected from abuse at the hands of their rulers. The people vote politicians in and they can vote them out. There are safeguards that prevent the accumulation of excessive power by potentially unsuitable individuals and stop them exploiting that power for personal ends.

But this is obviously not the case in authoritarian states like Putin’s Russia. It pretends it is a democracy, but in reality it is a personal dictatorship. And that makes it vitally important for Russians and the world to learn as much as possible about the character of the individuals who run the Kremlin. My own history has forced me to pay more than passing attention to this, and what I have learned is not reassuring. The extent of institutional criminality in Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin is staggering. The oligarchs of the 1990s, myself among them, were reproached for accumulating wealth, but they did so through the cut-and-thrust of business. Now, the oligarchs are inside the Kremlin and their wealth is derived from the brazen abuse of power.

It has reached the point where Putin and his cronies will fight any fight, commit any crime, destroy any opponent in order to preserve their wealth and keep the nation in their pernicious grip. Their bunker mentality and fear of what might come afterwards make them cling to power. The methods they are using to do this increasingly put the Russian people and the world in danger.

Things have to change, for Russia’s sake and for all humankind. Real change in Russia is possible only through the will of the Russian people; but the West can play its proper and constructive role in facilitating Russia’s transition from Putin’s mafia state to a more open, democratic country, as part of the community of nations. This is my attempt to examine the West’s efforts to curb the Kremlin’s repression at home and aggression abroad; to explain the reality of power in Putin’s Russia and how the West has frequently misunderstood it; and to show how the mistaken perceptions of leading figures – politicians, journalists and commentators – have shaped Western public opinion and led to misguided policies in East–West relations. It’s a story that looks back at how Russians have long admired the West, and how they took Western values and Western prosperity as an ideal to which they could aspire – a source of inspiration that has, in recent times, become tarnished. It’s a story that looks ahead, to ask if and how Russia can change. Can reforms end Russia’s status as a pariah state acting outside the democratic norms of the international community? What is the end goal for Russia’s future? What model of power would best serve the interests of the Russian people and the world as a whole? Can Russia become a part of the global solution, instead of part of the problem – and can the West help bring that transformation about? These questions must be addressed seriously and with urgency. Russia is one of the most important – and powerful – countries in the world. The world must not ignore her.

You might think that being locked up as a political prisoner in Vladimir Putin’s prisons and labour camps is unlucky, but I might disagree. I have read enough Shakespeare to understand the fate of his tragic heroes who attain worldly success, ascending to the heights of power and fortune, only to be struck down by reverses that strip them of all their gains. But as they plunge into ruin and despair, Shakespeare sometimes endows them with something they never had: the ability to see things clearly in themselves and in the world.

Before my arrest in October 2003, I had been close to the highest levels of power in Russia. In the early 1990s, I was an adviser to the first Russian prime minister, then a deputy minister myself, before returning to the business I had founded in the late 1980s and becoming one of the country’s leading industrialists. I was extremely wealthy, admired, envied and hated all at the same time.

My familiarity with the highest levels of power in Russia – and my subsequent experience of the punitive repression that such power routinely inflicts – followed by years living in a Western society that so many Russians admire and fear, has given me insight. Seeing and witnessing so much in both societies has convinced me that East and West have misunderstood each other so badly and so completely that, together, they are leading the globe into grave danger.

I was close enough to Vladimir Putin to discover how he thinks and to intuit the psychology of the man, to understand what his goals are for Russia and for himself. Few have had the opportunity to read Putin’s mind; even fewer have had the chance to say to his face everything they think about the corruption that exists right at the very top. I did exactly that in February 2003, in an angry, televised exchange between us that lifted the lid on the dark side of his regime and unleashed a chain of dramatic events for both of us.

Speaking truth to power – and doing so publicly – led to my arrest and incarceration. My experience of the capricious, personalised model of authority that Putin exercises taught me that there is a crucial difference between the Russian state and the men who now run the Kremlin. Putin is not Russia and Russia is not Putin. My prison years deepened my appreciation of Russia’s importance, her beauty and her future. They helped me to understand that Russia can be saved from an endless succession of dictatorships, that she can become a normal country, taking her rightful place in the community of nations, instead of a pariah state constantly embroiled in confrontation and acrimony.

When, finally, I was released from prison in December 2013, the authorities kicked me out of Russia, promising a life sentence should I ever return. Since then, while living in London I have gained an understanding of how Russia is seen from the West. It has helped me realise that the West can help Russia to solve her problems – not just for Russia’s sake, but for the West’s own sake, and for the world.

Earlier times: Vladimir Putin and I in discussion in the Kremlin, 2002

Putin and I debating the future of Russia in February 2003

I would define the West as those countries in Europe and the Americas where human rights are protected, where democratic values ensure that people have a choice in who governs them and where – despite the well-publicised challenges of recent years – civic institutions, checks and balances enshrine the right of the people to oversee and control those they have elected.

I live in a city and country where powerful Russians, exiled from their homeland, have been targeted and murdered by the agents of the Kremlin. The United Kingdom is a democracy, but Putin’s powers know no borders. I know that the same fate could befall me at any moment – the polonium slipped into my tea, the Novichok on my doorhandle – but I have learned to live with it. What I have not learned to live with is the thought that my country is in the hands of men who strive only to increase their own wealth and power. Living in the West, I have seen how politicians here have mistaken and misinterpreted Putin’s Russia, trying to accommodate him and the threat he poses; how they fell into the traps that Putin set for them.

Like many people in the public eye, I often feel that my identity has been taken from me and moulded into a shape that I do not recognise. Politics has become an acutely personalised business. When someone is involved in a public conflict, their image is appropriated and conflated with the values and prejudices of those who use it for their own ends. I was involved in one of the fiercest political controversies of modern Russia, and for me that made the process all the more extreme. For my supporters, I was a passionate champion of democracy, battling to save the nation’s soul; for my detractors, I was a greedy oligarch who stole the people’s inheritance. Neither version is the whole truth, but both have become ingrained in the polarised way I am now viewed.

Kierkegaard wisely pointed out that life can only be understood backwards, even though we are condemned to live it forwards. As well as looking to the future, I will look back at how today’s crisis developed over the past three decades, to consider why things in Russia have gone so wrong. It is 37 years since the then Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev advocated the establishment of a Common European Home uniting East and West in a cooperative endeavour, and nearly 30 years since Boris Yeltsin proposed that Russia should join NATO. Why was that moment of mutual respect and conciliation squandered? What condemned Russia to return to anti-Western autocracy? Why were the hopes of the Russian people, with their long-standing admiration for Western democracy and desire to share in its benefits, left dashed and disappointed?

Russia succumbed to the weight of its thousand-year history, to the seductive paradigm of an autocratic leader who sometimes makes the trains run on time but always takes away freedom, prosperity and dignity. Until the beginning of the 2000s we were building a democratic state, with all its initial-stage shortcomings, similar to what happened in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. From 2001 on – and especially after the Yukos affair, the battle over property rights and political values, in which the very public clash between Vladimir Putin and myself brought into focus the choice between the two contrasting futures available to the nation – the analogy is closer to early fascist Spain and Latin America: ‘To my friends, everything; to my enemies, the law.’ The fork in the road and the unfortunate path that Russia followed are obvious. Under Putin, Russia is in thrall to a brand of authoritarian state capitalism based around one leader. Society and the state apparatus are controlled through corruption, blackmail, intimidation and the arbitrary enforcement of the law, while the substance of independent civic institutions has been systematically undermined. This is no way to build a modern country.

Riot police clash with demonstrators during a protest against Alexei Navalny’s jailing in January 2021

But the West, which continues to inflict unnecessary damage on itself, is also to blame. The Kremlin has benefited enormously from democracy’s crisis globally, and from the realisation that Western liberal democracies have turned out to be more vulnerable to political corruption than many thought they were. When Vladimir Putin is criticised for political corruption and intolerance, he now simply points to the West. You may think there are imperfections here at home, he says to the Russian people, but just look how much worse things are in the countries of so-called Western democracy. It is an old tactic: I remember very well how, when Soviet leaders were attacked for their human rights abuses, they would retort that Black people in America or Catholics in Northern Ireland were being treated much worse. Such arguments have become an existential crutch for the Putin regime.

At times, it seems that both sides recognise the need for fundamental change, but neither seems capable of securing it. What should matter to all of us are the shared origins of our common European-Atlantic civilisation. Russians should not be strangers in the Western world. We are Europeans; we have helped to build and grow this civilisation, and I believe we will be an important part of it once again.

The 2020s have the potential to be a turning point for Russia. The invasion of Ukraine has thrown the future of the Putin regime into uncertainty and given ammunition to Russia’s democratic opposition. Putin’s decision to jail Alexei Navalny in 2021 made the popular lawyer and anti-corruption activist into a political prisoner, in the same way that I was in the 2000s. Navalny’s ‘crime’ was the same as mine: to have pointed out the corruption and self-enrichment of the president. He took the same decision that I did: to continue the fight, even if it means going to prison. It gave both of us status in the struggle for freedom and democracy. Modern technology now makes that struggle very public. Navalny’s exposé of Putin’s theft of public funds to build his extravagant palace on the Black Sea was viewed over 100 million times on the internet. Social media helped coordinate demonstrations against Navalny’s imprisonment all over Russia, not just in Moscow and St Petersburg; and hundreds of thousands of those who took part said they were motivated to protest against the Kremlin for the first time in their lives. They are mainly young people and their protest is not just about Navalny, but about the injustices that run through Putin’s Russia.

Discontent with the Putin regime has reached new heights. We are at a historic moment of opportunity that offers the chance of a better future. If it were to be spurned, the issues that divide East and West will become entrenched beyond redress. The security not only of Russia but also of the Atlantic alliance will suffer and global peace be put at risk. Men and women of goodwill on both sides must come together now to ensure this is not allowed to happen. What follows is my attempt to reveal how this can be done.