“Life changes principles. But not all of them”

Rules of life. Mikhail Khodorkovsky
Former owner of Yukos, 49 years old,
Correctional colony No. 7, Segezha, Karelia
Recorded by Dmitry Golubovsky and Svetlana Reyter

Esquire Russia, Issue № 81 – 26 October 2012 (the original version of the publication in Russian is here)

 How many push-ups can I do? Let me try right now… 70.

Jail is harder than colony. There are only four walls before your eyes, there is nothing and nobody to listen to: just the same two or three cellmates for half a year or a whole year. There is no sun, no wind, the smell is always the same… After all, even the daily walk in the exercise yard is “under a roof”. You gradually get a sense of forlornness, that you’re all alone, that you’ve been forgotten. In general, this is a kind of comprehensible psychological technique, a method of exerting pressure.

I’m ready to watch any news at all. Soviet experience allows me to pick out the necessary information even from a pile of crap.

Here, in jail, the flow of information, of course, is slowed down, but the lag is a matter of weeks, sometimes months, but not years. Of course there isn’t enough information. I can get any information, but with a big delay. Otherwise – radio (one programme), TV (one programme), newspapers (with a 3 day lag). Television is very important in jail – it’s a window on the world. In camp, I practically don’t watch it at all: there’s only one for 150 people, whose interests are clear.

Guberman said it best of all: “Jail, of course, — is darkness and an abyss. But even here, in this earthly hell, fear — is unfailingly the best compass leading to even worse peril.” In general, don’t believe anything and don’t be afraid. You can ask – more often they’ll help you, although sometimes they’ll cheat you.

People lie often. But I try to believe them nevertheless. After all, they speak the truth much more often.

What is the last film I saw? I don’t even remember any more. Most likely this was more than a year ago. If we speak in general, though, then probably the only film that immediately pops into my head is Come and See [an Elem Klimov movie about the occupation of Belarus [by Germany] – Esquire]. The rest – absolutely wonderful pictures along the lines of Ivan Vasilievich… or Gibbson’s The Passion – come to mind later. Even I find it interesting that whenever I’m asked any question about a film, Come and See immediately pops into my head – a movie that I couldn’t even watch to the end nearly 30 years ago…

In order to make a career here, you need to “snitch”, if, of course, it is the career of a whip-master that you’re interested in. There is no other “career” here.

I’m writing constantly. Mostly for myself, I’m systemising my thoughts. Everything that I consider needs to be published gets published. Sometimes even things that don’t need to be published get published.

In the colony all the days are standard. Reveille at 6.00, 10 minutes to get dressed, make your cot, shave, calisthenics, go to the toilet and off to breakfast in formation. 10-15 minutes “for porridge”. We get up. Off to work in formation. Then labour activity, senseless from an economic point of view: according to the law, FSIN are concerned “for the obtaining by convicts of labour skills, which will help them after release to liberty to earn for life”. Judging by what they’ve been teaching me, it is being assumed that either I’m going to emigrate to China, or China is going to immigrate to Russia. Get into formation for lunch. 20 minutes “for porridge”. Then off we march again to the workplace. At 16.30 we get back to the barrack. I read, I write. At six, the “trek” to supper, after which I read or meet with a lawyer. Lights out at ten. And so it goes, day in and day out.

I’m not accustomed to walking around unshaven, although people here usually shave infrequently.

There’s a lot that I’m afraid of. I’m afraid for my family, afraid of dying in an undignified manner, afraid of remaining ungrateful; doctors scare me a little – especially dentists.

During the second trial, most interesting of all was to watch judge Danilkin and prosecutor Kovalikhina. They are real people, anything but stupid. Facial expressions don’t get into the trial record; therefore, they were not very shy about demonstrating their attitude towards what was going on. The most intelligible and sensible was the prosecutor Go’lchahra Ibragimova. She directly declared right from the start: “You need not have hope; we are going to accomplish everything we’ve planned”. At least she was honest. But the favourite character, of course, was Lakhtin. When he started talking, I demanded complete silence from the lawyers. In a normal court, Lakhtin alone, without any outside help, would have caused the whole trial to fall apart. But this way – at least he provided amusement. “The defendants had a criminal intent to increase profit by way of expanding production; they therefore invested what had been stolen into the development of the company”.

The prosecutors kept stressing that what is produced from a well is pure oil, while oil-well fluid is just something we made up. When we brought oil and oil-well fluid from a concrete field into the courtroom (and they differ even in their appearance), there was a minute of silence. Then the judge demanded that the material evidence be removed from the courtroom and not brought back any more, whilst Lakhtin, regaining his composure, declared that this doesn’t mean a thing.

218 million tonnes of oil – this is very much. (This, according to the investigators, is the amount stolen my Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Platon Lebedev and “other members of the organised group” — Esquire.) Much more than all the rail tank wagons and storage capacities in Russia. How can it be stolen? This is a question to which none of the judges and prosecutors was able to give a comprehensible answer. Why they wrote such foolishness, I don’t even know. The most oil I saw was at a Transneft tank farm: four reservoirs of fifty thousand. Had they been full, this would be around 200 thousand tonnes. The reservoirs are very, very large. But you can only see oil “in the flesh” during an accident. I’ve seen it – some 300-400 tonnes had spilled. It looks very bad indeed.

Life changes principles. But not all of them.

Can our case be compared to the Dreyfus affair? Such a comparison probably has a right to existence, although, like any analogy, it has a limp. To the best of my knowledge, in the Dreyfus affair, for example, they didn’t take hostages and they didn’t hold them in jail, demanding that they slander themselves under threat of death or eternal jail. And one of the participants in the falsification of evidence was even arrested and committed suicide in jail. Dreyfus’s persecutors, having infringed upon his honour and liberty, did not engage in marauding in relation to his property. I’ll even stick my neck out and assume that the then-president of France didn’t have such strong personal feelings about Dreyfus as Putin has about me; otherwise, Dreyfus would hardly have been pardoned five years after his arrest at the government’s initiative, without any demands for “repentance” and without even a personal request for this.

A man can cry about the death of someone he wasn’t able to protect.

It makes no difference to the court whether or not I am right, they are merely there to give form to an order from the bosses. But their sentence makes no difference to me for that same reason. After all, my term is “until a special instruction”. In my “last word”, I said that nowadays, by all appearances, a prosecutor can simply spit on a piece of paper and ask for 14 years. After which the “judge” will write the verdict himself. So the quantity of “cases” (against Mikhail Khodorkovsky — Esquire) depends exclusively on Putin’s emotions, how much he’ll be afraid of me being at liberty.

I never aspired to the role of political, or all the more so personal, opponent of Putin, but was interested and engaged in what I understood best: the economics of industry, production. I still consider even now that he selected me for this role himself for some reason. Oh well, what else could I do, I had to play along, although to this day I try not to “get personal” in my public statements. That’s just how I was brought up.

The greater part of our fellow citizens “at liberty” are just as non-autonomous and dependent on “the bosses” in their public life as they are in their “private” life in the zone. Both here and there you’ve got anything-goes legal mayhem. Both here and there you can stand up for your rights, although this is hard and dangerous. But “at liberty” there is the opportunity for emigration (completely or into private life). In “the zone” there is no such opportunity.

An authoritarian regime destroys its founders and faithful adepts. We saw all this in Soviet times. Moreover, the perception of the world of both those who are being “licked” and those who are doing the “licking” is destroyed.

Can the state in the former Kampuchea (of the times of Pol Pot) be called strong? After all, he annihilated around 20% of the population, but he never did pull the country out of poverty. I consider that such a state can not be called strong. Cruel, despotic, overwhelming, but not strong.
To call a crazed thug a “strong person” would be stretching the Russian language somewhat. “Strong person”, just like “strong state” – these are words that characterize something big and magnanimous that helps people.

For the greater part of its history, the Russian state was absolute, having huge authority, but weak. It remains such today as well.

Can one resolve by way of civic initiatives the problem of guarding the most extensive land border in the world, through which passes a veritable flood of immigrants, narcotics, and illegitimate output of various degrees of harmfulness and dangerousness? No, one can not.

Can Russia with her restless neighbours on the continent get by without nuclear weaponry, or transfer it to civic structures that do not represent all of society? No, she can not.

Can a country where 70% of the territory is found in a climatic-and-natural belt unfavourable for life ensure the population residing there against possible problems without mechanisms that employ the resources of all of society? No, it can not. And the sole mechanism of such a kind (for a large country) is specifically the state. Humanity hasn’t come up with anything else.

I am capable of singing only if I’ve had a large amount to drink. That did occasionally happen in my youth, but I’ve wiped all those horrors from my memory.

The last time I got into a fight in 1987. As it turned out later, it was over my future wife.

The USSR is my Motherland. I was born there and lived there until I was nearly 30 years old. But I don’t miss the “dear old Soviet Union” at all, and I just think it’s wild when I hear that things were better back then. Even Putin with his corrupt bureaucracy doesn’t look all that disgusting against this background. Although the main thing that has remained “Soviet” is precisely this: a bureaucracy that deems itself to be the highest estate. Impudent, irresponsible, fawning obsequiously on the bosses while haughtily pushing their fellow citizens around.

I would rather not get distressed and anguished about it [death]. I feel sorry for close ones. I haven’t yet fully repaid all my debts. But death – no, I don’t fear it. I have my memories, and I’m not afraid to go.

People have not disenchanted me. Perhaps I’ve just been lucky?

The editorial board would like to thank Karinna Moskalenko, Elena Levina and Maria Ordzhonikidze for their help with arranging the interview with Mikhail Khodorkovsky.