Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man and then its most famous political prisoner, now has his eye on the future — his country’s. Can he invent a new Russia from exile?

By Masha Gessen

A quarter of a century has elapsed since the breakup of the Soviet Union, and still we confront the problem of Russia. I write those words dispassionately, as if I were an outside analyst clinically twirling a globe. But as someone who carries both an American and a Russian passport, who has lived and worked in Russia, and who has friends and family there, I could just as easily turn the sentiment around: a quarter of a century after the end of Soviet totalitarianism, weRussians still face the problem of Russia.

Yes, many of the other former Soviet republics are hardly utopias—but they are also not angry expansionist powers with nuclear weapons and nervous neighbors. The Baltic states are by now fairly well integrated into Europe and the world economy. So is virtually all of Eastern Europe, which once was under Soviet sway. Most of these countries have made a transition to some form of democratic rule. Not coincidentally, most of them had a memory of such institutions to build on, as well as a thick and never-quite-eradicated weave of private, religious, and social groups—“civil society,” to use political-science jargon.

Russia lacks that memory, and civil society was largely supplanted by grim state-controlled substitutes over a period of seven decades. The years immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union were full of contradictory events, including the explosive growth of civil-society institutions, but today’s Russia remembers the 1990s as an era defined by crime, corruption, chaos, political disarray, and economic despoliation—Lord of the Flies on a Eurasian scale. It is a measure of Russia’s distress that the ascendance of Vladimir Putin, a decade and a half ago, was greeted by many, inside and outside of Russia, with relief: at last a sober, serious man—even refreshingly bland, after the Boris Yeltsin circus—who might bring order to the country. But the order he brought was that of a mafia state. The apparatus of government is in the hands of a sprawling family-like structure that strives only to accumulate wealth and power. Free institutions wither on the vine or are strangled in the crib. Journalists and political activists are murdered with impunity. Foreign capital is fleeing. Leveraging nationalist fervor, Russia has annexed one part of Ukraine, invaded another, and hopes to make the rest of that country a docile satellite, in the meantime fueling a war by turns furious and festering. And Putin shows no sign of leaving office anytime soon. He poses shirtless for the cameras, as if to suggest his mastery over time itself. Next year, Russia will mark the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution, meaning that for fully a century Russia has been conducting its gruesome experiment in violence against the minds, hearts, and bodies of its people. The following year, people who were born under Putin will have the opportunity to cast a ballot in a sham election, as his reign enters its 19th year. You have to wonder, as people inside and outside of the country do, what could possibly happen that would transform Russia from what it is into the “something better” it might become? Even if such a transformation were possible, you also have to wonder how long it would take, and who would have the patience for what is likely the work of decades, and may not get started for years.

The most influential Russian to ask these questions—and come up with answers, however plausible they may be—is today an exile from his native land. He is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia until, in 2003, he fell afoul of Putin and was stripped of his wealth and sent for a decade to a prison camp. Khodorkovsky was set free in 2013 as a cynical goodwill gesture, and promptly expelled from Russia. Reunited with his wife, Inna, and a daughter and twin sons, he spent his first year of exile in Zurich and then moved to London. I have talked with him a few times over the past two years, in New York, in Zurich, and in London. He now wears the look of a tech entrepreneur who has retired early. His stubble is longer than a five-o’clock shadow but shorter than his buzzed gray hair. He dresses casually, usually in black. For a while he spent his time shuttling between Zurich, where he maintained a sparse small office, and Prague and London, two cities with some of the highest concentrations of recent Russian exiles. Late last year, though, the Russians decided that they wanted him back behind bars and issued a warrant, so he has confined himself largely to London, where he is but one of many of Putin’s “wanted” men.

Nine months after his release, Khodorkovsky relaunched Open Russia, a foundation he had established in 2001. He was not the only oligarch to set up a foundation, but he was among the first, and his was by far the most actively political among them. Khodorkovsky’s vision in those days was optimistic verging on utopian. He had made his first fortune in his mid-twenties, by founding one of the Soviet Union’s first private banks. He made a far larger fortune in his thirties, using Russia’s desperate and corrupt privatization schemes to acquire what became the country’s largest oil company. Then he emerged from the 1990s, incongruously and perhaps prematurely, with the idea of transforming his businesses into transparent and civic-minded ones, and his country into one that relied on intellect and innovation rather than oil and mineral resources for its wealth. The original Open Russia funded civic initiatives, including media and educational organizations. After Khodorkovsky’s arrest the foundation was eviscerated—a major blow to civil society in Russia, which was heavily dependent on Khodorkovsky’s money.

The new Open Russia is ambitious: it is an attempt to build an entire new leadership for Russian society that would exist and function parallel to the current one—until the current one implodes and Khodorkovsky’s pre-fab Russian leadership takes its place. Just as a shadow cabinet hones its skills while out of power, so too, in Khodorkovsky’s vision, must shadow leaders, shadow bureaucrats, shadow journalists, shadow organizers, and other shadow citizens practice their craft even though—or because—Putin’s regime has usurped all the institutions and activities that normally comprise a functional society. What Khodorkovsky is assembling is a vast Rolodex of Russian talent—people who can get to know one another, can publish, can teach and speak publicly, and can build ties with sympathizers still in Russia. The Rolodex grows.

Soon after he was released from prison, Khodorkovsky came to the conclusion that Russia was not ripe for an armed revolution—and that, in any case, violent revolution would bring far more suffering than it could possibly alleviate. I sensed a hint of disappointment when Khodorkovsky laid out this conclusion for me in November 2014. He really does believe that armed struggle is the only threat that, in the present moment, could truly influence the regime. It was armed struggle, or the threat of it, that toppled the oligarchic government of Ukraine, in 2014. But most anti-Putin Russians are not prepared to make that kind of sacrifice. “And I think people do have the right to live a quiet life in our country,” Khodorkovsky admitted. “Things suck, but life goes on. And people go on, and accumulate a little bit of capital—apartments and things. And I guess as long as people can go on living like that, it would be wrong to break it. Russia has broken enough lives already, of enough of its citizens.” Khodorkovsky’s own life is a vivid example, and not the worst: his company was effectively confiscated by the state; his billions have been reduced to millions; many of his former employees are in prison; many more are in exile; one is dead; and Khodorkovsky himself cannot go home.

If there is no potential for immediate armed struggle, he acknowledged, “this regime cannot be toppled. It will continue moving along its own trajectory.” The trajectory cannot be indefinite. Like all closed systems, the regime will eventually come to an end—if only because Putin himself will eventually die. The question is, What happens then?

It could be 20 years from now, at which point Khodorkovsky will be in his 70s. He told me that he never said that his project would be completed in his lifetime: “Just because we may not see cold fusion in our lifetimes is no reason not to work on it.” His own plan is to devote the next 10 years preparing Russia for its next chapter: creating a network of many thousands who have a wide range of skills and experience working together. Quoting another Putin opponent in exile, Garry Kasparov, Khodorkovsky said, “We are running a marathon that can at any moment turn into a sprint.” He went on, “And when the starter pistol goes off, as can happen at any moment, society must know that there is a team capable of assuming the role of government. If we are not that team, then there will be another team that takes over. And if the other team doesn’t exist, then we descend into a crisis of governance.” That is the sad story of regime change almost everywhere.

Khodorkovsky’s math is straightforward: “Right now there are about two million people on the state payroll in Russia, including roughly 600,000 who actually work in the federal government. Out of those, tens of thousands will be lost”—in the transition to a new regime—“and will need to be replaced. Some of these people will have worked in key positions. This means that we need several thousand people, if not tens of thousands of people, who are capable of playing a political role that goes beyond technical competence: we need people who will be able to direct the process of transitioning to a new direction.”

The goal is twofold: first, to assemble an army of civilians who are capable of performing all the tasks that need doing in a country; and second, to find ways, in a nation where the public sphere has been effectively destroyed and communication severely restricted, to publicize the existence of such people and create an atmosphere of trust and goodwill around them, even as those of them who are physically in Russia are being silenced, marginalized, discredited, and killed.

I asked Khodorkovsky to tell me who among Russia’s current political activists looked most promising to him. He said, “Before I say something good about someone, I should really ask that person if he wants it to be publicly known that I said something good about him.” He would acknowledge only that “if you are talking about people with whom I cooperate, then a 160-page notebook turned out to be insufficient.” A paper notebook? “That’s correct. If something can put someone in danger, I will not trust it to a computer.” He finally named several people as potentially key players, off the record, and then one on the record: the former Yeltsin cabinet member turned opposition organizer Boris Nemtsov. Three months later, Nemtsov was gunned down in sight of the Kremlin, on the eve of a protest march he had organized. His assassination had nothing to do with my conversation with Khodorkovsky and everything to do with the state of politics in Russia. Putin has declared open season on what he calls “the fifth column.” All prominent anti-Putin activists and journalists are subjected to a constant barrage of threats. Two weeks after the Nemtsov murder, Khodorkovsky’s Moscow press secretary, Olga Pispanen, came home after celebrating her birthday and found a funeral wreath propped against her apartment door. Another three months after that, one of Khodorkovsky’s Moscow staffers, 33-year-old Vladimir Kara-Murza, collapsed at his office; by the time an ambulance had taken him to the hospital, his kidneys had failed from the effects of a still-unknown toxin. He survived, but weeks later he was still in the hospital, receiving dialysis, and the source of his catastrophic illness remained unknown.

Khodorkovsky professes not to be intimidated. “Whatever the Kremlin’s spin doctors and its television propaganda are trying to tell us,” he said, “Putin is no superman and he most certainly will not be remembered as a hero. He may be tackling bears on television, flying around with migratory birds, and hunting tigers, but all that is fantasy. Putin with his exposed torso is no strong leader: he is the emperor who has no clothes.”

Maybe. But the emperor has teeth. We may be at the point where one can only safely work against the Putin regime from abroad. Many of Russia’s most prominent intellectuals have left the country in the past two or three years. Khodorkovsky was shipped out. Kasparov, who now lives in New York, was forced to choose between emigration and arrest. So was Russia’s greatest living economist, Sergei Guriev, who now lives in Paris. Grigory Chkhartishvili, the writer known as Boris Akunin, moved to France, not so much out of fear as of disgust. The art curator Marat Guelman cited similar feelings when he moved to Montenegro. A dozen of the country’s best-known journalists have resettled in New York, Washington, Berlin, London, Geneva, and Tel-Aviv. One of a couple independent Russian-language news-gathering organizations, Meduza, is based in Riga and staffed by journalists who moved to Latvia from Moscow to set it up. Hundreds of brave souls continue to work in Moscow and other parts of Russia, but Khodorkovsky’s shadow society will have to be assembled largely abroad—not only a government but a civil society in exile.

In March of this year several hundred recent political exiles, some of them still shell-shocked from their move, gathered in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, to discuss what happens after Putin. Several of Khodorkovsky’s people were there, but he himself did not play a leading role. One reason: unlike all other conference speakers (I was among them), Khodorkovsky has not unequivocally stated that in the post-Putin future Russia must forfeit Crimea. His argument has been this: however wrong the annexation may have been, it has already occurred, and when the Putin era ends, the choice to forfeit the region will have to be made by a democratically-elected government, whose decision he cannot predict. His opponents argue that illegal annexation of another country’s land is an issue that tolerates no hedges. Within weeks of the conference, Khodorkovsky brought one of its most colorful speakers, entrepreneur Yevgeny Chichvarkin, formerly of Moscow and presently of London, into his own organization. “When something belongs to someone else, there is no room for discussion,” Chichvarkin has repeatedly said of Crimea. Khodorkovsky was demonstrating that he is determined to cast the widest possible net.

Probably the most explosive question at the exiles’ conference was that of the Russian parliamentary election scheduled for September of this year. A 2014 change in election laws has made it possible, at least in theory, for individuals to declare their candidacies for direct election. Still, the state employs a wide array of ways to keep people off ballots or to stuff ballot boxes—to say nothing of the farcical functioning of the parliament itself. Taking part in the election spectacle serves only to legitimize the regime’s lies, argues one side in this debate. Anything we can inject into the public vacuum helps destabilize the regime, and counters the other. Khodorkovsky’s is the third way: he is fielding a slate of 19 candidates because his shadow society needs to get its electoral feet wet. It is a trial run. It is also a risky undertaking, though, for reasons that have nothing to do with the rigged nature of the election itself: some may feel it exposes how limited Khodorkovsky’s human resources are, even after a few years of assembling his Rolodex. In a country of 142 million people and 83 regions (after Putin’s annexation of Crimea, the region and its principal city, Sevastopol, were designated the 84th and 85th legislative divisions of the Russian Federation, and Crimeans are eligible to vote in the election in September, never mind that most of the world still considers Crimea to be part of Ukraine) Khodorkovsky has only a handful of people to run. Last time there was regime change in Russia, in 1991, it involved a comparably small number of people, but that transition was hardly a model for the democratic rebirth that Khodorkovsky envisions.

And Khodorkovsky may not know enough about present-day Russia to pull off what he has planned. He has not walked a Russian street since October 2003. As we talked, I realized that he may not appreciate a transformation in Russia that goes beyond the rabid nationalism, the flag-waving, and the war-mongering. In the past four years, Russia has gone from being a post-ideological society to one that is gripped by a new ideology, centered around something the Kremlin calls “a traditional-values civilization.” This ideology, essentially medieval and hermetic, is facilitating the rapid restoration of totalitarian mechanisms. Culturally and politically, Russian society has returned to a pre-liberal state and planted itself there that much more firmly for having briefly encountered liberalism. Khodorkovsky brushed aside my concern about how much he really knows about the present state of Russia’s soul: “It’s not like Russia has an alternative. We are a part of the European, or, to be more precise, the North-Atlantic civilization. We can try to pump ourselves up as much as we want, with talk of our own separate world. But the fact is, there are too few of us Russians to form a separate world.”

Perhaps he is right: when the Putin regime disappears, as inevitably it must, its ideology may simply crumble, creating an opening for Khodorkovsky’s pragmatic politics of good people and good governance. But he may also be completely wrong. If that’s the case, all he will have accomplished over the course of the next decade—or however long the Putin regime lasts—is supplying meaningful, paying jobs for several dozen Russians and public engagement for thousands. That’s the biggest investment anyone is making in Russia’s future these days.

This article was first published in Vanity Fair