Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon who got rich in the post-Soviet legal vacuum, makes an unlikely democracy activist. Photograph by Davide Monteleone / VII

It has been a year since the guards at a prison camp just below the Arctic Circle told Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon and once the richest man in Russia, to pack his things. They put him on a plane to St. Petersburg; there they handed him a parka and a passport and put him on a flight to Berlin. Since that day of release and exile, Khodorkovsky has been living outside Zurich and travelling to capitals throughout the West, making speeches, accepting awards, and hinting broadly at a return to Russia. He will tell anyone who asks that, after a decade in various prison camps, he would not mind displacing the man who sent him there—Vladimir Putin.

One warm, drizzly evening this past September, Khodorkovsky was in Paris, speaking to an audience at the Opéra, on the Place de la Bastille. He is fifty-one now; he’s become stockier since his release, and his graying hair has grown out of the prison buzz cut. He was dressed casually, as always, in jeans and a sweater, and spoke in a quiet, well-mannered voice. Still, as he took questions onstage from a journalist from Le Monde, he displayed none of the modesty of his forebears in dissent. Andrei Sakharov would never have spoken of taking up residence in the Kremlin. “It wouldn’t be interesting for me to be President of the country when the country is developing normally,” Khodorkovsky said. “But if the issue becomes that the country needs to overcome a crisis and undergo constitutional reforms, the main aspect of which is the redistribution of Presidential power to the courts, parliament, and civil society, that part of the job I would be willing to do.”

When it came to Putin, his remarks were sly, glancing. “It’s hard for me to say that I’m thankful,” he said of his release. “But I am glad.” It was quite the understatement from a man who, once estimated by Forbes to be worth more than fifteen billion dollars, had been reduced to a life of manual labor. In the camps, Khodorkovsky never knew if he would ever be released. And when he finally was, in December, 2013, it was as a public-relations gesture before the Sochi Olympics—when Putin still cared about the West’s opinion of him.

That evening in Paris, the audience was thick with Russian émigrés. For more than a century, Paris has been home to waves of Russians in flight. At the end of the nineteenth century, Lenin lived there unhappily; he called the city a “foul hole.” After 1917, he was replaced by the White Russians who had fled his Bolshevik regime. The Russian authorities estimate that nearly two hundred thousand people have left the country in the past year, a record for Putin’s Russia. The figure does not include the unofficial émigrés escaping the increasingly authoritarian atmosphere of Moscow and the deepening economic crisis. They cluster in London, Paris, and New York, and in nearby capitals like Riga and Prague.

In 2011 and early 2012, while Putin was Prime Minister, pro-democracy forces in Moscow staged a series of mass demonstrations, but once he returned to the Presidency, in May, 2012, he cracked down on political opposition and independent media. He has made plain that there is not much room anymore for dissent––not from a former billionaire with political ambitions, like Khodorkovsky, and not from the urban middle class, which had dreamed of transforming Russia into a European-style democracy.

“I will always cheer you on, but I will never ‘Woo-hoo!’ you.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

These days, many of those who still agitate for a freer Russia assemble abroad. The editor of Lenta.ru, once the most popular news site in Russia, was pushed out because of the site’s reporting on the war in Ukraine; most of the editorial staff resigned in protest. Part of the team moved to Riga, where it has established a new Web operation, called Meduza. Ilya Ponomarev, once a vaguely oppositional figure in the Russian parliament, is now living in San Jose, California. Anna Veduta, the press secretary of the opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner Alexey Navalny, is studying at Columbia University. Navalny’s lieutenant, a banker named Vladimir Ashurkov, is in London, having fled a set of trumped-up criminal charges. Leonid Bershidsky, one of Russia’s most prominent columnists, is writing about Russia’s ills from Berlin. Sergei Guriev, an economist who once advised both the Kremlin and Navalny, now teaches in Paris, at the Institut d’Études Politiques. Rustem Adagamov, one of Russia’s leading bloggers, is in Prague. Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia, a loose affiliation of journalists and activists, has its nerve center there, too.

There is a long history of opposition figures pondering and trying to influence the Russian condition from abroad. In the nineteenth century, Alexander Herzen, a liberal populist living in exile in London and Geneva, published essays in his journal, Kolokol (The Bell). (The tsar, Alexander II, was an ardent reader and eventually agreed to free the serfs.) Leon Trotsky edited Pravda while living in Vienna. Lenin, who, after Paris, lived in Zurich, not far from where Khodorkovsky lives now, began publishing his Communist newspaper, Iskra (The Spark), in Germany.

Today, according to one study, Russians spend more hours on social media than does any other nationality. Operations like Meduza and Open Russia can reach many millions, despite the Kremlin’s attempt to shut down access to opposition sites. Khodorkovsky believes that he is well positioned to affect the course of Russia, even from abroad. For one thing, he is rich. Of his original fortune, he is said to have about half a billion dollars left (he himself insists that it’s a hundred million). And although he remains physically cut off from the ferment of Moscow, he has taken to Twitter and Facebook to rally Russians both inside and outside Russia’s borders. The question is whether anyone is listening.

After Khodorkovsky’s talk, I ran into Arina Ginzburg, the wife of the late Alexander Ginzburg, a Soviet-era dissident who, in 1979, was exchanged for two Soviet spies imprisoned in the U.S., and eventually settled in Paris. She had gone to the talk even though she was ill and had been housebound for months. She was surprised by Khodorkovsky’s declaration of intent, but also pleased. “It’s the opening of a second front,” she said. “And I support it.”

In an office near the Bastille, Khodorkovsky was making an attempt––a digital attempt––to lay the groundwork for his political return. Sitting at a desk, he tried to make effective use of a Microsoft tablet and a MacBook Air. He typed awkwardly and read aloud from the tablet, looking up occasionally into a camera that beamed his voice and image to activists in Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl, Yekaterinburg, Barnaul, and other Russian cities via Google Hangout. None of these technologies had been in wide use when he went to prison, in 2003.

The way forward, Khodorkovsky said, was to form a horizontal network among like-minded, Western-leaning Russians—Western “adaptants”—which the state could not easily destroy. He was counting on the ten or fifteen per cent of Russians who fit this category. In some cities, like Moscow and St. Petersburg, he believed, it could be as high as a third. This amounted to a “minority within a minority,” he conceded, but in Russia a progressive, or radical, minority has always been the engine of political change. “It is this network movement for a law-based government, one that is open to its citizens, that I propose to call Open Russia,” he said. He was arrested during a tour for the first iteration of Open Russia, in 2003. He founded the organization, in 2001, as a way of fostering European values in Russia.