Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Mikhail Khodorkovsky is presented as one of the oligarchs who converted Russia’s abrupt, disorderly transition to a market economy into immense private wealth. The book traces his rise through the undervalued vouchers and assets of privatization, then marks his later arrest and imprisonment as a reversal of the new order: the businessman who acquired a major oil company for a fraction of its annual revenue ends up sent to Siberia after a rigged trial.

Emergence in the New Market

Khodorkovsky first appears among three young, energetic businessmen named as emblematic of the oligarchs: Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Khodorkovsky. They had grown up in a society where business was forbidden, then were abruptly told they could pursue it in a country with no established rules, laws, banking system, or taxation. The narrative does not give Khodorkovsky a separate account of his early life; instead, it places his ascent within this sudden opening, where commercial ability met institutions not yet equipped to regulate it.

The voucher program was intended to turn citizens into investors and establish private property after decades of collective ownership. On September 1, 1992, vouchers worth 10,000 rubles were mailed to every Russian citizen over one year old. But price liberalization brought inflation of 2,600 percent, so the vouchers had lost most of their value by the time they arrived. Some recipients could exchange one for little more than a bottle of vodka; others sold them to buyers offering roughly the value of a bottle and a half. The account identifies Khodorkovsky, Berezovsky, and Gusinsky among the shrewd purchasers who became multibillionaires within months.

Yukos and the Scale of the Fortunes

Khodorkovsky’s wealth is made concrete through Yukos. Under the loans-for-shares scheme, banks lent money to a cash-strapped state and received shares in valuable, not-yet-privatized companies as collateral. If the state did not repay the loans within a year, the lenders could take the pledged assets. Khodorkovsky paid $168 million for Yukos, an oil company bringing in $3 billion a year. The contrast between its purchase price and annual revenue gives the scheme its defining scale: public assets passed into private hands at prices the narrative presents as astonishingly low.

The book places the oligarchs’ fortunes in an economy based on raw materials rather than technology. It describes wealth that generated little public prosperity and disappeared into opaque offshore networks, including businesses in Liechtenstein and the Cayman Islands. Khodorkovsky’s Yukos thus stands both for the reach of his own fortune and for a broader form of privatization in which control of natural resources could yield enormous private returns without, in the account’s telling, creating comparable wealth for society.

Wealth and the Political Contest

The loans-for-shares arrangement made the presidential election consequential to the oligarchs. Its repayment deadline fell after the vote, and they feared that Gennady Zyuganov, if elected, might repudiate the deal. The narrative describes Berezovsky rallying the six most powerful oligarchs, whose financial and media influence was then directed toward securing Boris Yeltsin’s reelection. Their outlets pressed a stark choice between Yeltsin and chaos, while documentaries and films about Soviet repression reminded audiences of the past the campaign invoked. Khodorkovsky is situated among the oligarchs whose fortunes and interests were at stake in this collective intervention; the account does not single out a separate campaign action by him.

This episode links private wealth to political power without making the two identical. The oligarchs had obtained assets through a state-designed arrangement, and they then used their combined resources and media reach to influence who would govern. Khodorkovsky’s presence among the named beneficiaries makes him part of that new elite, even as the narrative’s account of the campaign focuses on the group’s collective leverage rather than on his individual decisions.

Putin’s Rise and Khodorkovsky’s Reversal

As Yeltsin’s second term neared its end, Berezovsky proposed Vladimir Putin as a successor who would be loyal to the oligarchs. The narrative describes Berezovsky as believing that Putin could be relied upon, and then looks ahead to the consequences of that miscalculation. Three years after their meeting in Biarritz, Berezovsky and Gusinsky were forced into exile; Khodorkovsky was arrested and sent to Siberia after a trial the book calls rigged.

Khodorkovsky’s fall is sharpened by the account’s qualification that he was the only oligarch who tried to turn over a new leaf by making the management of his oil empire more ethical. That effort did not spare him from prosecution or imprisonment. His course therefore closes on a pointed reversal: a fortune accumulated in a period when public rules were weak could not guarantee independence once state power had been reasserted. The book uses his fate to show how quickly the balance between business and government could change, and how precarious the oligarchs’ apparent command of the post-Soviet order had been.