Putin's crackdown on Khodorkovsky

The book links Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on Mikhail Khodorkovsky to the oligarchs’ own effort to secure a political order favorable to their fortunes. Boris Berezovsky helped install Putin as a supposedly compliant successor to Boris Yeltsin; three years later, Khodorkovsky, the one oligarch said to have tried to make his oil empire more ethical, was arrested and sent to Siberia after a rigged trial. Their relationship is presented not simply as a clash between a ruler and a wealthy businessman, but as a reversal in which the political instrument chosen by the oligarchs turns against them.

The economic foundations of oligarchic power

After the Soviet system, Boris Yeltsin and Yegor Gaidar sought to create a market economy quickly through what they called shock therapy. Price liberalization brought inflation of 2,600 percent. A voucher privatization scheme was meant to give each Russian a share in national wealth: on September 1, 1992, vouchers worth 10,000 rubles were mailed to every citizen over one year old. By the time they arrived, inflation had made them nearly worthless; at most, a voucher could buy a bottle of vodka. Many recipients sold theirs for little more than that.

The buyers included Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who became multibillionaires within months. The account emphasizes the abruptness of the transformation: people who had grown up forbidden to conduct private business were suddenly told to do so in a country with no settled rules, laws, banking system, or taxation. The resulting concentration of wealth gave the emerging oligarchs resources that could be converted into political influence, but it did not create a stable boundary between private fortunes and state power.

The oligarchs choose a successor

As Yeltsin’s second term approached its end, the oligarchs sought a successor they expected to cooperate with them. Berezovsky proposed Vladimir Putin, then a little-known former intelligence officer who had quietly headed the Federal Security Service for a year. Berezovsky’s case to the other oligarchs rested on Putin’s apparent loyalty to superiors, not on a public record of independent power. With their approval, Berezovsky flew to Biarritz, where Putin was vacationing with his family, and offered him the job.

The account gives this recruitment a pointed retrospective irony. Berezovsky believed he had arranged a useful succession; the narrator identifies the decision as the worst of his career. The bland, deferential officer would prove to be a remorseless power-seeker who brought down, one after another, the people who had helped make him ruler. The oligarchs’ wealth and political organizing had secured Yeltsin’s re-election, but their ability to shape the next leader did not mean they could control him.

Khodorkovsky’s arrest and the reversal of the alliance

The book distinguishes Khodorkovsky from his fellow oligarchs without presenting him as outside the system that enriched them. He had been one of the beneficiaries of the voucher sell-off, but he was also the only one identified as trying to turn over a new leaf by making the management of his oil empire more ethical. That effort marks him as a contrast within the group, not as someone protected from the consequences of its political choices.

Three years after the meeting in Biarritz, Berezovsky and Gusinsky were forced into exile. Khodorkovsky was arrested and, after what the book calls a rigged trial, sent to Siberia, a destination that recalls the older history of political punishment. The sequence makes the crackdown personal and concrete: the oligarchs’ presumed ally does not merely outmaneuver their collective influence; he removes particular members of the group from the country or deprives them of their freedom. Khodorkovsky’s attempted ethical reform does not prevent his downfall, while the other oligarchs learn to watch their step.

Political influence and the limits of control

The earlier campaign to keep Yeltsin in power shows how much influence the oligarchs could wield before Putin’s ascendancy. Facing the possibility that voters might turn to the Communist Party, they feared a government that might repudiate their loans-for-shares agreement. Under the scheme, banks lent money to the state, with shares in valuable, not-yet-privatized resources such as natural gas and petroleum offered as collateral; if the state did not repay the loans after a year, the lenders could take the shares. The election deadline made Yeltsin’s continued rule central to their financial interests.

Berezovsky responded to the perceived danger by bringing six other powerful oligarchs together, despite a violent feud between his own enforcers and Gusinsky’s. The seven pooled their financial and media power behind Yeltsin. Newspapers, radio, and television promoted the choice as Yeltsin or chaos, while documentaries and films recalled the Gulag, Stalin-era famine in Ukraine, and political purges. This display of coordinated influence sharpens the later reversal: men able to mobilize the country’s media and financial resources for a president’s re-election could not ensure that the successor they selected would remain answerable to them. Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment is the starkest instance of that loss of control.