Table of Contents
Praise for THE OLIGARCHS
In terms of sheer drama, its an irresistible tale, and David Hoffmans new book... milks it for all its worth... Many future readers will find themselves returning to Hoffmans book to find out what, exactly, makes Russia tick.
Newsweek
Hoffman brilliantly shows how seemingly halting and insignificant acts finally culminated in changes in a whole society.
Washington Post
Hoffman makes the tale of the mens rise and fall a masterful blend of adventure and serious, informed analysis.
Foreign Affairs
[Hoffman] offers one the most wide-ranging and sober of several recent descriptions of the oligarchs during the painful past decade of change in Russia.
Financial Times
Engagingly written... the most comprehensive and most fascinating account of the new Russia to date.
San Jose Mercury News
This sad story comes to life in David Hoffmans sprawling new book... for those interested in the future of this puzzled and puzzling country, Hoffmans book could not have come at a better time.
Washington Monthly
Hoffmans masterly account of this period... dispels any doubts that [the oligarchs] did call the shots... Without their efforts the Russian people would still be languishing under a hopelessly ineffective command economy. That is one view. The other is that these men were self-serving opportunists who carried out the biggest heist in history... It is the success of Hoffmans compelling story that we come away convinced of both versions.
The London Sunday Times
(Listed in 100 Best Books of the Year)
Finally, a truly revelatory book about the men who remade Russia in the 1990s... experts will be astounded by Hoffmans great reporting, but any curious reader will be intrigued by the stories of these mens extraordinary lives.
Robert G. Kaiser
David Hoffman has produced a monumental book... The Oligarchs may be the last book ever written on the subject since it is hard to imagine anyone else trying to replicate let alone improve upon the quality of research, analysis, and prose contained in this book.
Michael McFaul
To Carole
The Oligarchs
Ten Years Later An Introduction to the 2011 Paperback Edition
IN MOSCOW, outside the Khamovnichesky courthouse on the morning of December 27, 2010, a hundred or so people gathered on a snow-covered knoll, dressed against the bitter cold in heavy coats, some of them holding up protest signs bearing a photograph of a man with short-cropped, graying hair and rimless eyeglasses. Together with the people, for a new Russia! declared one placard. To freedom ! said a large campaign-style button.
Inside the courtroom, the man in the photograph was standing inside a glass-covered steel cabinet, with a lock and chain on the door. He was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of the most ambitious of the first generation of oligarchs who rose to wealth and power after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The day before, at the end of a twenty-two-month trial, Judge Viktor Danilkin had found Khodorkovsky guilty of embezzlement. Khodorkovsky had already spent more than seven years in prison after an earlier trial and conviction of fraud. Now, as the judge, without looking up, read from the lengthy verdict, speaking rapidly and almost inaudibly, Khodorkovsky and his codefendant, Platon Lebedev, listened from inside the glass detention box.
Out on the street, Interior Ministry riot police seized anyone carrying a protest sign on the knoll and dragged them to a waiting bus. Some of the signs criticized Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who had ruled Russia with an autocratic hand for a decade. Everyone who held up a sign was arrested. Several of those detained were old women. When one particularly frail woman was arrested, the crowd stirred, chanting Shame! and Freedom! Some of the protesters went right up to the officers and shouted in their faces. Do your children know what youre doing here? said one. Arent you ashamed of yourself? demanded another. The riot police stood by impassively.
By 1:00 P.M., about twenty demonstrators had been taken away. The crowd thinned. Vadim Klyuvgant, one of Khodorkovskys lawyers, came out of the courtroom in a black suit without an overcoat. He said that the judge had not yet pronounced a sentence, but that what had already been read aloud indicated it would be severe. All of the prosecutions charges had stuck, except those for which the statute of limitations had expired. Klyuvgant suggested that the judge was under strong guidance from the powers-that-be. He did not say precisely who. He added, This is a disgrace.
Two days later, on Thursday, December 31, Danilkin delivered the sentence: Khodorkovsky would have to serve another six years. Khodorkovskys mother, Marina, bitterly assailed the judge, Damn you and your descendants! Through his lawyers, Khodorkovsky released a statement: the verdict showed, he said, that you cannot count on the courts to protect you from government officials in Russia.
Leonid Gozman, the head of a small progressive political party with ties to the Kremlin, said, This is shocking. It was obviously a political, not a judicial decision.
Khodorkovsky was taken out of the glass box and returned to prison. It seemed that Putin had succeeded in locking him up and throwing away the key.
But then something unusual happened. On February 14, an Internet news portal based in Moscow, Gazeta.ru, and an online video channel, Dozhd TV, carried an interview with Danilkins assistant, Natalia Vasilyeva, who was also the court press secretary. She said that the judge had started to write his own verdict, but instead was forced to deliver a different one, given to him by higher authorities. I know for a fact the verdict was brought from the Moscow City Court, which oversees Danilkins court, she said. Of this I am sure. The judge was sort of a bit ashamed of the fact that what he was reading out was not his own, and so he was in a rush to be rid of it. She added, I can tell you that the entire judicial community understands very well that this case has been ordered, that this trial has been ordered.
The whole spectacle offered a revealing glimpse of the system Putin created to rule Russia. On the surface, all the outward trappings of a market democracy could be found: courts, laws, and trials; stock exchanges, companies, and private property; newspapers, television, radio, and Internet news outlets; candidates, elections, and political parties; and even a few gutsy people to hold up protest signs or whisper truths about the judge. But the real power was in the hands of Putin and his cronies. Their control was not absoluteit was a soft authoritarianismbut when they decided to go after someone, as they did with Khodorkovsky, they got their way.
When The Oligarchs was written a decade ago, the architects of the new Russia hoped that freedom and competition would drive politics and capitalism. President Boris Yeltsins reforms gave rise to a people more free and entrepreneurial than any in Russian history. Millions went abroad for the first time, voted in elections, enjoyed a free press, and learned to rely on themselves rather than the state. Anatoly Chubais, who transferred a vast treasure of state-owned factories, mines, and oil fields to private hands, expressed confidence that the new owners, even the greediest tycoons, would be more effective than the old Soviet bosses, simply because they would be forced to compete in a free market that would determine winners and losers.
