Putin must choose reform or revolt, jailed oligarch Khodorkovsky tells RFI

Russian President Vladimir Putin faces a choice between political reform or social upheaval, jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky told RFI on the 10th anniversary of his arrest on tax evasion charges. Khodorkovsky's suporters believe he was punished for financing the political opposition.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky Getty Images

At the time of his arrest Khodorkovsky, an oligarch who had made a fortune after buying the privatised oil firm Yukos, was Russia's richest person.

Now he is in jail, like other convicts living in "two to three square metres per person, [with] a queue for the washbasin and the toilet, only cold water, a shower once a week".

"I have had occasion to spend time in three jails and two zones, not counting transits," he told RFI's Anna Stroganova. "The conditions everywhere are similar. A bit better here, a bit worse there."

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Interview with Pavel Khodorkovsky - Mikhail Khodorkovsky's son

Pierre Delrieu

He admits to suffering depression "but self-discipline and the support of friends and family have helped me keep from getting soft".

"The weak and the ambitious get broken by prison, scoundrels are forced to prove their mettle, leaders are taught understanding and humility," he says. "Just plain good people help make prison life tolerable. I thank them for this."

Khodorkovsky was arrested at a Siberian airport where his plane had stopped to refuel in 2003.

He was found guilty of tax evasion in 2005 and of embezzlement in 2010 and is due to remain in prison until August 2010.

There was widespread criticism of the rise of a super-rich oligarchy after the sale of Russia's national assets following the fall of communism and there was criticism of the political influence it came to wield.

But when Vladimir Putin first came to power Khodorkovsky, who had been deputy energy minister under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, refused to toe the new president's line.

When Putin offered to leave the oligarchs alone if they stayed out of politics, he started financing independent media and conferences on institution-building.

Putin's critics say that was the reason for his arrest, which virtually put a stop to Russian businessmen funding NGOs, according to a statement by rights campaigners issued on Friday.

Two choices face Russia today, Khodorkovsky told RFI, "top-down democratisation" or protest that could lead to "the most unpleasant displays of dissatisfaction".

The first is "top-down democratisation", a "gradual liberalisation of public life, with the opposition being allowed to participate in a real struggle for power in conditions of honest elections, even if only at the regional level at first and then at the federal", he says and he thinks Putin has already started that process, in spite of his authoritarian instincts

"Reason is suggesting to Vladimir Putin that such steps are unavoidable but his feelings - supported by a part of the entourage - are protesting loudly."

The alternative is a rising tide of protest as Russians whose living standards have stagnated join young people and opposition forces in demonstrating their dissatisfaction.

"In any case, the democratic opposition faces the task of not letting the protest turn off from the peaceful path, of getting society to understand the general democratic recipes for solving the country’s problems as an alternative to the senseless switching around of figures in an authoritarian regime," Khodorkovsky says.

"I personally am convinced that it will be successful. Russia has always chosen the European path of development in the end."