N.P.: And why didn’t this reform take place in our country?
P.I.: Because the same people stayed in power. All the reforms of the 1990s were going on in our country slowly and inconsistently. At the beginning of the 2000s, important laws were adopted: the new Criminal Procedure Code came into effect in a timely manner and was quite progressive. But then Putin began building up his “vertical power” system, and Yegorova set up her own vertical system for the Moscow judiciary. As a result, we ended up with the system that is currently in place.
© Alexander Maslov
N.P.: Okay. And how is that pertinent to your own situation?
P.I.: What I didn’t understand then, but do understand very well now, is that I should have left earlier, back when they first arrested Khodorkovsky. But I thought that I would manage to come to an agreement with investigators, that I’d be able to explain myself, that if I made a couple of phone calls, they would protect me, shield me. After all, what did I have to do with all this? I am not Khodorkovsky. And only when I felt the soldering iron in the butt did I understand that it was time to beat it, and fast. I beat it. My understanding came too late. Although, on the other hand, I wasn’t thinking much about this back then. But when they started asking for false testimony, I wasn’t ready to do that. That’s not how I was brought up. As soon as they made me the offer, that was it — the gate slammed shut and I took the car to the airport. I decided to leave and wait it out.
N.P.: Wait out what exactly?
P.I.: Until things settled down. It only became clear later that things would not settle. Everything that happened with Khodorkovsky and YUKOS was done by people who do not want Russia to become a country with an adequate justice system, proper conditions for business, and the opportunity for people to earn money. In that kind of a country, these people wouldn’t be able to hold power. Who are they? Putin, [Deputy Prime Minister Igor] Sechin, [Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai] Patrushev, former general prosecutor [Vladimir] Ustinov, that very same investigator Karimov…
N.P.: So what then is the essence of this political conflict?
P.I.: This is a conceptual conflict. Private businesses want to grow according to some comprehensible rules, in which the judiciary and the law enforcement systems work within the boundaries of the law and protect it, not the other way around.
N.P.: Is there not a tug-of-war between the state and private businesses, where each one says: “L’état — c’est moi?”
P.I.: No. The state is a mechanism that serves me. But the Putin-style state tells us: “You’re nothing but a bunch of dumb cattle, and we’re the masters.” And this is a completely different conceptual approach.
N.P.: Dmitry Gololobov, describing the reasons for the conflict between Khodorkovsky and the state, says that for many years, since Yeltsin, large companies have been teaching those in power to get used to taking money, that businesses have been actively making use of the existing organs of power for their own interests.
P.I.: This is not a unilateral thing. It wasn’t Khodorkovsky who was attempting to build up his business by bribing government officials. There were a whole lot of things going on there, like the officials themselves asking for bribes. What were the expenditures for corruption in the oil business and at YUKOS? The constant need to pay off officials who determined the quotas for the pipelines. The pipelines, as you know, are a state monopoly: there are no other pipelines. They paid for the distribution of quotas, how much you could pump per year through these pipelines. All this was in the hands of corrupt officials demanding bribes. If you did not agree to pay, you simply wouldn’t be able to effectively deliver oil.
N.P.: That is, there was a budget for bribes at YUKOS?
P.I.: It would have been impossible to operate without this. Without bribes you wouldn’t get into the pipelines. How could YUKOS become the second largest company by volume of oil loaded into the pipelines if it didn’t come to an agreement with the people who built and ran this corrupt system?
N.P.: So what was the reason for the conflict between Khodorkovsky and those in power? Could it all have been about the pipelines?
P.I.: No, of course not. The root of the conflict was on a higher, more political level. Khodorkovsky managed to build up a large independent company, which was working in accordance with the law and which would have soon stopped paying bribes altogether. And it would stop satisfying a huge official apparatus’ appetite. After all, the company wanted to build its own pipeline. But clearly there can only be one pipeline in Russia — the one owned by Transneft. This was the reason why Khodorkovsky was in a serious conflict with the state.
