Nadezhda Pomerantseva: Do you consider yourself a political refugee?

Pavel Ivlev: There is no question that I do consider myself a political refugee, but not in the legal sense of the term. I never applied for a political refugee status — I simply had no need for it. I had an American green card long before I ran away from Russia.

N.P.: How did you get one?

P.I.: My wife won it in a lottery many years ago, all the way back in 1995. My father was already living in America then. For several years in a row he was sending out envelopes for us to participate in the lottery. I remember I was studying in London then…

N.P.: You’re not from an ordinary family, then, are you Pavel…?

P.I.: I am from a simple family. Yes, I was studying in London in 1995, but it was because I was participating in an educational program for young lawyers arranged and paid for by the British Council. I simply filled out the British Council application forms and submitted them.

N.P.: But, in reality, you are a political refugee?

P.I.: Factually — yes. I ran away because of big political proceedings in Russia, even though initially I was not planning on leaving the country.  I was quite happy there at the time:  I had a job I loved in Moscow. A year and a half ago, I obtained U.S. citizenship. But the history with YUKOS had a negative impact on this process too—the matter was dragged out because of the reason I fled. To the best of my knowledge, the decision to grant me American citizenship was adopted at a sufficiently high level and was preceded by many months of correspondence between the State Department and immigration services. You must understand that there is a completely different view of Russia here. Since the time the country began to rebuild itself during perestroika, the United States also changed its attitude toward Russia. And when Putin came to power in the early 2000s, Americans did not understand how seriously everything had changed, and to which extent. Therefore, if you ran away from Russia in the first half of the 2000s, for the American agencies you are first and foremost a criminal who wants to evade justice in the motherland. After all, U.S. officials don’t understand to which extent [Vladimir Putin’s] prosecution on the part of a “democratic country” is illegal. It is a huge misconception, to think that the American government needs us at all — they need us like a hole in the head, so to speak. Here they’ve got their own massive bureaucratic system, and as long as you’re not a citizen, to them you’re a second-class person who came to the great country of America. So go ahead and prove that you deserve to remain here.

N.P.: What was your official reason for leaving Russia? What charges were lodged against you?

P.I.: The charges are simple: I was accused of having stolen oil in huge quantities and of laundering it afterwards. Officially they called it something like embezzlement — either of oil or of the proceeds from its sale. It takes a long time to explain. The Russian Criminal Code articles involved were numbers 160 and 174.

N.P.: How many years in prison could you be facing in total?

P.I.: According to the current rules, a maximum of ten years.

N.P.: Has a criminal case been opened against you?

P.I.: There is a criminal case against everybody who bears any relation to YUKOS. I’ve got the same charges as [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky, [Platon] Lebedev, [Vasily] Shakhnovsky, etc. There are very many of us. An entire list of “accomplices” in the charge against Khodorkovsky, and I am on that list.

N.P.: So you’ve got a collective criminal case there. But has a separate case against you been filed?

Separately, against me personally — no. Initially the same kind of charge as the one against me was also lodged against Valdes Garcia, [Vladimir] Pereverzin and [Vladimir] Malakhovsky. Plus [Mikhail] Brudno and [Vasily] Shakhnovsky. Pereverzin and Malakhovsky are currently in jail. As for the rest… it is a very long story.

 

© Alexander Maslov

 

N.P.: The main accused parties nevertheless were the YUKOS shareholders — Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev. The others in this story were seen as pawns, and, at first, many offered to cooperate with the investigation.

P.I.: And that is exactly why I fled. Because they started calling me in to the General Prosecutor’s Office for interrogations, saying: “You have to give us some kind of compromising testimony against Khodorkovsky, Lebedev, Brudno or Shakhnovsky.” They shouldn’t have been interrogating me in the capacity of a witness — this was already in direct violation of the criminal procedure code. When I complained that this was an outrage, they replied that it was okay, and that they were going to continue to violate the law: “And if you want to start showing off, then I’ll detain you right now.” This was all said to me openly on November 16, 2004. I did give some kind of testimony later that night. The investigator [Radmir] Khatypov let me go, apparently assuming that I might still be useful for getting the “necessary testimony.” Right after the interrogation, that very same evening, I got into a car, drove as far as Sheremetyevo, got on the last plane to Kiev and left.

N.P.: And what about your family?

P.I.: My family remained at home, in Moscow.  I didn’t say a word to anybody and just drove to the airport right after the interrogation. I phoned my wife when I’d gotten to Kiev and said: “Katya, I’m in the birthplace of my grandmother.” My family came to New York at the beginning of February 2005. Before that, I was shuffling all over Europe and we would talk on the phone or we’d get together once in a while. My wife didn’t sell anything — we still own an apartment in Moscow, to this day. Why should I sell my property? I don’t consider myself guilty. But the family’s departure itself was, of course, a big deal — for example, they detained my wife at Sheremetyevo, and there was a big scandal. But now they are all with me.

N.P.: How did it happen that after being a witness you became an accused?  After all, they didn’t make you sign a statement promising not to leave the country, which means you didn’t actually violate anything.

P.I.: No, there was neither a signed pledge, nor a prohibition. But a lawyer doesn’t need an explanation to figure out what’s going on. After the interrogation and direct pressure on the part of the investigator, I understood everything. After Kiev I went to Latvia, and here investigator Khatypov calls me on my Moscow cell phone and says: “Why don’t you drop by my office, we’ve come up with a whole bunch of questions for you.” These were the first days of December 2004, when they had already arrested Sveta Bakhmina. And I understood what was happening.

This took place a week before the Yuganskneftegaz auction, and they were simply clearing the field. Salavat Karimov, then the chief investigator in the YUKOS case, had а carte blanche to lock up anybody and everybody, which, in fact, is exactly what he was doing. That’s why I told investigator Khatypov right away that I had three children and I wasn’t going anywhere. To which he said to me, and I quote: “People might suffer.” And later I understood what did he mean by that.

N.P.: Did anyone offer to drop your case if you paid them?

P.I.: Yes, of course, some people did offer that. But this was mostly done by random officials who didn’t understand much — simply put, this is not the kind of case, which can be dismissed for a bribe.

N.P.: So who were the people who “suffered” in the end?

P.I.: I then said: “I’m not going to show up.” On the other end of the line, they said: “Okay.” And several days later they arrested Lena Agranovskaya, the managing partner in our law office. She sat in jail for 10 days. Meanwhile, I was free in Europe, observing all of this. The first charge against me was lodged at the end of December, that is, a month after my departure. At that moment, it became clear that it was a good idea for me to stay away from Russia.

N.P.: Did a trial ever take place?

P.I.: So far I have not been convicted, but I don’t rule out that an in absentia trial against me might begin soon. I’ve heard that they are supposedly planning on trying everyone in my situation — everyone who’s on the run. I saw some documents recently, stating that the cases of all those involved in the Khodorkovsky case are going to be passed on to the courts, to be tried in absentia this coming fall.

N.P.: What was your title in the YUKOS company?

P.I.: Officially I had none. I was one of the partners in a law office. YUKOS was a client of ours from 1996 onwards: we offered them support on a number of issues, including legal counseling, assistance with courts, signing of documents, and managing their bank accounts through the power of attorney. Before that I worked for the Menatep group in a different office. I met Khodorkovsky in 1994.

N.P.: So, in essence, they just tacked you on to the main criminal case because you were YUKOS’ lawyer?

P.I.: Yes, except for a small detail: I wasn’t a key player. By that time, Khodorkovsky had already been sitting in jail for a year and he had completely different charges. But the team for the YUKOS case continued working. And so in the summer of 2004, when Lebedev had already served a year in prison,and Khodorkovsky served 9 months, the accusers and people behind them came up with a new invention, stating that “YUKOS’ partners had stolen the oil and then laundered it.” The prosecution believes that all the oil that had been produced by YUKOS and its subsidiaries from 1998 through 2003 was stolen by Khodorkovsky, Lebedev, and Nevzlin, etc. What a charge, don’t you think? There’s no point in asking me why — you should ask Karimov about it.Effectively, this is what took place: On November 12, 2004, a mob of investigators, cops and secret operatives burst into our office in the center of Moscow, demanded that we hand over all our documents and tell them everything we knew about the Menatep group and YUKOS. The threat became absolutely real. Those people were going to shove soldering irons up our asses.

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.

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.

N.P.: But how can one discuss democracy having paid bribes for this many years?

P.I.: You’re right. But Khodorkovsky was trying to distance himself from the system of corruption. Such radical changes cannot be made overnight. Khodorkovsky built up a different kind of system within YUKOS in which any theft was clamped down on very harshly. He then wanted to build a similar system on the outside, so as to not be dependent on the appetite of the state any more.

N.P.: A state within a state?

P.I.: Not quite. Of course YUKOS was, in a certain sense, copying some fragments of the Russian state, but the idea was different: this was a business, subordinated to making profits for the shareholders.

N.P.: Then there’s Vladislav Surkov, the “grey eminence” of recent domestic Russian politics: a high-ranking employee of the Menatep group and a friend of Leonid Nevzlin [Vice Chairman of YUKOS board].  And nothing. Nobody is summoning him to court or sending out subpoenas related to the YUKOS case.  Even yourself, while listing the villains, did not mention his name.

P.I.: This is a big question. First off, I am personally acquainted with Slava Surkov better than I am with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, with whom I interacted face to face only once. I met Surkov when he was working as the ORT (Russian Public Television) Deputy Director. I always considered Surkov an expert in PR, journalism and state policy, not an expert in business. He is not a manager — he is more of a project strategist who knows how to come up with a plan and find the right people to implement it. Surkov was good at it, too —, whether at Menatep, ORT, or Alfa-Group. Then he left for Yeltsin’s administration. By the way, if you recall, when Putin first came to power, he initially kept Yeltsin’s entire cabinet…

N.P.: But what about a so-called invasion of the Kremlin by the St. Petersburg clan?

P.I.: At first Putin brought in only a couple of his St. Peterburg buddies —[Viktor] Ivanov and [Igor] Sechin. In fact, I have my own version of how things are set up in there. Russia’s top leadership is divided into two groups: those who simply serve the system and those who actually rule. Putin, Viktor Ivanov, Igor Sechin and figures who are less noticeable but close to them—these are the masters of our country. The rest of them, starting with Medvedev, are those who serve the regime and do not make any strategic decisions. Now Slava Surkov is one of those people who is simply doing their job. He was given the task of creating a “sovereign democracy.” So he came up with the concept, which was then found suitable by the masters, and now Surkov is simply implementing it.

You must understand that all of these famous people can think and say as much as they want that destroying YUKOS was wrong, but it doesn’t change anything. Because there is the mob boss, the “leader of the nation”, who decided that Khodorkovsky must be kept in jail and that Medvedev must become president.
Putin’s conflict with Khodorkovsky is not a personal conflict but a conflict of two different mentalities and different ideas on what direction the country should be going. And Putin’s idea is that the large oil businesses must be controlled by the state and that “l’état — c’est moi.”

N.P.: But there are other participants in this affair, like the forgotten “Darth Vader of the Russian system”, Igor Ivanovich Sechin, for instance.

P.I.: Nobody has forgotten Sechin. We always considered him a key figure. Sechin is an unconditionally gifted person and at the same time a top-notch scoundrel. He managed to have a say on important matters, to remain by Putin’s side for many years, and to influence him, to some degree. It is precisely Sechin whom I would call an effective manager, one who believes that the state can hold the right to manage immeasurable assets and to lead “this bunch of cattle” known as the Russians into the needed direction. After all, it is impossible to manage such a huge and complicated machine as Russia all by yourself. So Sechin acts as the second head of Putin’s dragon. And there are many more heads to this dragon, even though they might be smaller in size.

N.P.: And who would you say is the third dragon’s head influencing Putin?

P.I.: Today, I would say it is the head of the Security Council, [Nikolai] Patrushev. The fourth is [Defense Minister] Anatoly Serdyukov.

N.P.: Let’s talk about you again. You are actively engaged in human rights activity in the U.S. Why do you choose to do that and what exactly do you do?

P.I.: Right now I am trying to push through the Sergei Magnitsky Bill [a prohibition on entry into the U.S. for officials having a relation to the case of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.]  I travel to D.C., I engage in political conversations with people, I explain why this Bill is important. It’s good that people like [William] Browder [CEO of Hermitage Capital Management and one of Magnitsky’s clients] thought up this bill and were able to push it through to a certain level. So that officials guilty of Magnitsky’s death, of Khodorkovsky being locked up, of Russian journalists getting killed, would bear responsibility for all of their wrongdoings. On the other hand, we are supportive of Russia joining the World Trade Organization, because this will force the country to observe international norms and rules, which, of course, does not suit Putin. By the same token, I, would clearly love to return to Russia — to this day I remain a Russian citizen, and would love to live there, but Putin’s regime is actively preventing me from doing so.

N.P.: If you do a Google search on “Pavel Ivlev,” you’ll get a link to the Interpol website, where you are listed as wanted in connection for “money laundering.”  Why can’t Interpol find you, even though you are legitimately residing in the U.S.?

P.I.: Interpol itself doesn't search for anybody —  it is only a database saved on a large bureaucratic computer located in the French city of Lyon. Whenever some country’s officials ask Interpol to upload information about someone on its website, Interpol publishes the information, that’s all. There are 25 of us there — 25 people posted there for the YUKOS case. Then each separate country decides for itself whether to search for the accused or not. And the Americans did in fact decide for themselves — they granted me U.S. citizenship.

 

From the Interpol website.

 

N.P.: From a lawyer’s perspective, what is the Russian system in need of the most right now?

P.I.: First and foremost, we have to get rid of the prosecutor’s office. It has to be reformed because it is impossible for it to continue existing in its present state. Secondly, we have to conduct a lustration and make the data on all FSB (Federal Security Service) employees and those who cooperated with them, public. Yes, to do this you’d need a lot of digging around in archives, which is lengthy and costly, but on the other hand, it is imperative because all those people are continuing the genocide of their own people. Today’s Russia is not a police state, but a gangster one, a state under the protection of the FSB and a cluster of comrades spit on the people and simultaneously build palaces for themselves. Besides that, we need to get rid of a minimum of half of the judges’ corps and appoint or elect new ones, independent and unsullied ones. That is, we need to do what was done in other Eastern European countries.

N.P.: Do you come up with some positive ideas, too? Or just with the ones that dismiss and prohibit?

P.I.: Power needs to be decentralized and transferred to the regions. This will break the current system of vertical power, which doesn’t work anyway. Governors’ elections need to be brought back. Elections in general need to be brought back, as much as possible. Russia is a country of such vast proportions that it cannot be effectively governed in a centralized manner. Russia needs a decentralization of power like we need air, or the country will fall apart.

N.P.: One last question: If Putin were to be put on trial tomorrow, what would you charge him with?

P.I.: A lot. Anywhere you look, there are crimes: the mass killings of peaceful Chechen inhabitants without any trial or investigation during the course of the Second Chechen War, for example… In any case, Putin must definitely be tried by a jury. If I were to prosecute him, I would ask for a life sentence.