Mikhail K contemplates life in the cage

HANDCUFFED to his prison guard, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once boss of the Russian oil giant Yukos, is greeted with spontaneous applause as he is escorted into a bulletproof glass cage with his former business partner, Platon Lebedev. Since the second trial of the two men began a year ago, writers, actors, politicians, diplomats and journalists have all flocked to the small courtroom. Now that Mr Khodorkovsky has begun to give evidence, the benches there have become the hottest seats in town.

To mark the occasion, two exhibitions have been staged in Moscow. The latest, a surreal show of comic pictures, was mounted in a derelict factory with a façade resembling the wall of a prison (see article). Yet no art form can compare with the absurdity of reality. Mr Khodorkovsky, already serving an eight-year sentence for underpaying tax on Yukos's profits, is now charged with stealing the oil produced by his company. The new case violates the principle of double jeopardy and also contradicts the first one. Had Mr Khodorkovsky stolen all the oil, how could Yukos have recorded a big profit and underpaid tax? The lack of an injured party and of evidence that the oil ever went missing makes the second trial Kafkaesque.

The explanation may be simple, however. Mr Khodorkovsky's sentence runs out next year. Those who put him in jail cannot afford to let him out, partly for political reasons and partly because they are worried that the property which they expropriated from Yukos is now the subject of international litigation. To keep Mr Khodorkovsky in jail, the old charges have been repackaged into a new case that could keep him locked up for as long as another 22 years.

The political motives of the new case also explain its legal inadequacy. The prosecutors have thrown every possible charge at Mr Khodorkovsky with little in the way of evidence. Instead, they caricature the entire Yukos operation as illegal. The indictment is vague, woolly and incoherent. But this has made Mr Khodorkovsky's defence stronger. His detailed, page-by-page analysis of the indictment (which can be read here) demonstrates the legal nihilism of the prosecution. Kirill Rogov, a political observer, has argued that this is now a courtroom where the prosecutors, not Mr Khodorkovsky, are on trial.

He speaks with the authority of a chief executive of what was once Russia's largest oil company. He explains how Yukos and Russia's oil industry functioned, but he goes beyond business matters. What he is defending is not his long-lost business, but his human rights. The transformation of Mr Khodorkovsky from a ruthless oligarch, operating in a virtually lawless climate, into a political prisoner and freedom fighter is one of the more intriguing tales in post-communist Russia.

Good and bad oligarchs

The legacy of Mr Khodorkovsky's oligarchic past is still evident in the ambivalent attitude revealed by opinion polls. Few Russians believe that their courts are objective or that the destruction of Yukos has benefited anyone other than a small group of Kremlin cronies. But only a quarter would like to see Mr Khodorkovsky set free. Even so, the respect he now commands among Russia's intellectual and business elite is a tribute both to the strength of his personal convictions and to the progress he has made since being arrested at gunpoint on a Siberian airport runway seven years ago.

His arrest and imprisonment were expected and could have been avoided. After Vladimir Putin came to power as Russia's president in 2000, the choices offered to Russia's oligarchs were clear: either submit to the Kremlin and join the ranks of its loyal friends; or surrender your wealth and leave the country. Unlike other oligarchs, Mr Khodorkovsky would not choose. He decided to stay in Russia and defend his rights to property, dignity and independence. His personal ambition was no longer satisfied by making money and building Russia's most successful oil company. He said he wanted a normal country too: one in which wealth and independence need not be mutually exclusive.

To this end, he fully disclosed his financial interests. He openly financed different political parties, including some strongly opposed to the Kremlin. He defended the independent media. And he channelled his wealth into building a civil society in Russia. It was these actions, says Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a veteran human-rights activist, that landed Mr Khodorkovsky in jail.

Having chosen this path, Mr Khodorkovsky has engaged in activities traditional for Russian dissidents and political prisoners. He has written political articles, exchanged letters with Russian thinkers and writers, and commented on every significant event in the country. “He has not wasted those years in prison: he has read and thought a great deal,” comments Ms Alexeyeva. One of his exchanges cost him 12 days in solitary confinement, but more recently, his articles have been widely published without any immediate repercussions.

Some of his statements have stirred controversy—notably when he lambasted Russian liberals for their servility and when he argued for a greater role for the state in the economy (which he contrasted with the Kremlin's use of state functions in narrow commercial interests). But his right to speak his mind was beyond dispute.

The person who is most irritated by Mr Khodorkovsky's enhanced status is Mr Putin. In a recent interview he went out of his way to compare Mr Khodorkovsky to Al Capone and implicate him in a murder in the 1990s of which he has never been formally accused. Mr Putin's crossness is understandable. Mr Khodorkovsky's arrest and trial became a defining moment of his presidency.

In this narrow sense, indeed, the imprisoned Mr Khodorkovsky might be compared to the exiled Andrei Sakharov in the 1980s. Both Mr Khodorkovsky and Sakharov, an eminent nuclear physicist, chose a thorny path. And both of these one-time political prisoners then, in effect, took their persecutors and jailers hostage. Just as Mikhail Gorbachev's talk of perestroika, opening up and new thinking, rang hollow until the moment when he allowed Sakharov to come home, so any talk by the Kremlin of the rule of law or about modernisation will be puffery so long as Mr Khodorkovsky remains in jail.