N.P.: After this, they supposedly froze your accounts?
P.I.: They didn’t freeze anything, but I never kept money in Russia anyway, because I was fully aware of the risks of our domestic banking system.
N.P.: Tell us about your life today.
P.I.: We live in a New Jersey village, in the middle of a forest, quite literally. My oldest son attends the University of Pittsburgh, where he is studying to become a computer engineer. My younger ones go to a local public school, while my wife manages the process. I can safely say that we belong to the well-to-do part of the American middle class. I own my own business.
N.P.: What kind of business?
P.I.: I own a consulting company, Feldmans Consulting. Private consulting earns me up to half a million dollars a year. My experiences translate into a lot of useful information for my clients: how Russians can do business in the world and how foreigners can do business in Russia, for instance. I can deal with international law because that is what I was actually doing for the 20 years prior to my emigration. Plus, on a voluntary basis, I am the Executive Director of the Institute of Modern Russia (an American NGO). Pasha Khodorkovsky [son of Mikhail] is the president and the public face of our organization, while I deal with everything else. In reality, my time is divided 50-50 between private-commercial and civic activities.
© Alexander Maslov
N.P.: Have members of your family been back to Russia since you left?
P.I.: My wife has visited Russia, yes, but not the children. To be perfectly honest, I disapprove of these journeys because I fear that the government might attempt some sort of provocation. If the investigators had no problem arresting Lena Agranovskaya so that I would return and then arresting Sveta Bakhmina in order to force Dmitry Gololobov [former head of the YUKOS legal department] to return, then anything can happen. After all, the prosecutors never concealed the fact that they were, in fact, taking hostages.
You must understand, it was the lawyers who had the toughest time of all during the YUKOS trials, from a moral standpoint. We understood what was going on. We could have backed off. But we chose to defend this company, and as soon as we went ahead, we were seen as a buffer between the prosecutor’s office and the company. We were the first buffer they faced. Moreover, we had to do everything in accordance with the law, while the prosecutor’s office could operate whichever way they chose. That’s why I left, but then they locked up Sveta Bakhmina…
N.P.: But you were part of this judicial system to a certain degree, after all.
P.I.: Yes, to a certain degree I was. Although I can’t say I liked it—being a part of a corrupt, interdependent, dishonest system. Partly, this is why I chose to deal more with international, rather than with domestic courts. The way the court system in Mos cow works is a violation of the fundamental principle of judiciary independence. And this has been going on forever. It’s not just about the Khodorkovsky case. This is a systemic thing. All the important cases are examined like this: the judge answers to the chairman of the court, while the chairman answers to his superior in the Moscow City Court, who is in turn responsible for his district.
N.P.: What does “responsible for his district” mean, exactly?
P.I.: When the decision of a district court is appealed, the case always ends up in the hands of the same group of people. That’s not how it should be, but that’s how it is set up. For example, in the U.S., a court case ends up before a specific court by a lottery, by chance. In Russia, by law, the court chairman distributes all court cases among the judges. You end up with a closed circle. It could be broken if they introduced a random method for distributing cases. This would immediately resolve many issues, including corruption.
The Moscow court system was set up by the new chairwoman of the Moscow City Court, [Olga] Yegorova. She came to power at the same time as Putin did. In the 1990s, there was a transitional period. Somewhere near the end of the 90s, judges began to feel a little bit of independence: they felt the right and the duty to judge according to the law and not the way that upper management dictated. Nobody really taught them this and nobody reformed the old system, although, of course, looking back, they should have all been kicked out and new people brought in. This is what they did in all the former socialist countries when the entire law-enforcement system was being changed—the judges, the prosecutors. Yeltsin, unfortunately, did not go ahead with such a purge.
