Eesti Ekspress (Estonia), October 3, 2013
Eve Tisler
Pavel Khodorkovsky, the son of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, lives in the United States and says he is in touch with his father—who has been in prison in Russia for almost a decade—at least every other week. But they don’t talk about politics; they talk about family.
October 25 is the ten-year anniversary of the arrest of former oil-mogul and oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The last time Pavel Khodorkovsky, 28, saw his father was in September 2003 when Mikhail stopped by Babson College near Boston to see how his son was doing with business management studies.
Pavel showed him around the campus, and Mikhail went on to a business meeting in Washington D.C. The phone rang one month later (Pavel remembers it was a Saturday morning), and his mother told him that his father had been arrested.
I am meeting Pavel Khodorkovsky at the Institute of Modern Russia, which is located in the Garment District of Manhattan. Entering the building, I sidestep a rack of dark brown fur coats glittering in the New York autumn sun. “Good place with a reasonable price,” Pavel explains the practical choice of the office’s location.
The office of the think tank Pavel founded three years ago is an ordinary, ascetic space—the walls are white, the furniture black, the coffee machine in one corner, the restroom around the corner down the hall. The two young ladies and the young man clattering on the keyboards are obviously used to hearing Mikhail Khodorkovsky being discussed in the corner of their office.
Pavel is a chip off the old block, his dark eyes sparkling when he shakes my hand with a friendly smile. He is well-versed, his talking accompanied by vivid gesticulation, and only a hint of a sore throat occasionally breaks his flow.
October is a busy month since there are events being held around the world on the ten-year anniversary of his father’s arrest. In addition to the opening of an exhibition in Tallinn, Estonia, on October 3, it is the first time Misha Friedman’s corruption-themed photography exposition is going on display in Russia as a part of the Media Udar festival. Add to that a new exhibition opening in Washington D.C., a charity concert in Berlin, and public readings of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s books.
Pavel runs out of words only when he gets to talking about his father’s arrest and imprisonment. In the course of the last decade, he has had to discuss this numerous times, but it is evident that it is still not easy for him.
When you met your father for the last time, did you know that if he went back to Russia, there was a possibility that he was going to be arrested?
Yes, I knew that was a possibility; he himself told me so. Did I know that it was certain? No. I didn’t think that was going to happen. It’s easy to analyze looking back that it was pretty obvious, but back then it didn’t seem like a possibility. Too many things were at play. The company (Yukos, the oil company of Mikhail Khodorkovsky) was very important to the Russian budget; it was one of the biggest taxpayers—even bigger than Gazprom at that time. It just didn’t make any sense. Both the fact that my father would be arrested and the fact that the company was going to be bankrupted. But Mr. Putin (hard not to notice a touch of irony in Pavel’s voice) and Igor Sechin (a political ally of Putin) wanted to have the necessary guaranteed income into the budget and a geopolitical lever of influence.
Was one of the reasons your father went back to Russia that he didn’t think he’d be in jail for ten years, but rather, for example, one year?
That’s part of it. There are two parts. My father felt obligated to try and get out people who were already in jail—Aleksei Pichugin (former security official in Yukos) and Platon Lebedev (businessman friend of Khodorkovsky). And back then he thought that he had a better chance of doing so if he were in Russia. He was sure at the time that he would be able to defend himself in court. He realized that there was a possibility of his arrest. That he could spend a couple of years in pretrial. But he thought that given the opportunity in an open trial, he would be able to prove his innocence and get released. We know that isn’t the case, because the court system has turned completely subservient to the government.
Pavel runs an energy-monitoring company called Enertiv, where he is also a partner. If he is not on a business trip to France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, or Germany, he works out of the business office located next door to the institute. He likes to walk there from his Chelsea home. And the evenings he spends with his wife and three-year-old daughter.
You belong to the new generation of Russians...
Hopefully. (Smiles)
...who think differently. Are there people like you in Russia who want to make things better?
I would call that actually the middle generation because the younger generation is the people who are now fifteen and sixteen years old or finishing up high school in a couple of years and are going into universities. Unfortunately, their way of thinking is different. They’re too young to remember the good outcomes of Perestroika, but they’re young enough to absorb the new norms in society, including the fact that corruption is the new way of life. So, unfortunately, the younger generation who are choosing their careers right now will have a different outlook. I don’t know if that outlook is reversible, but their way of thinking is definitely different from people who are my age.
Young people think corruption is normal?
First, they don’t think that corruption is normal. Most likely there isn’t an active process of thinking about corruption. Let’s be realistic: that is not something people think about every day. But the trouble here is that by not asking critical questions of themselves and of the government that supposedly should actually be fighting such things as corruption, people lose connection with how their lives can be better. The fact that corruption has become so embedded in society that when people travel outside, let’s say for example to the United States, it’s a shock to them that they’re getting a traffic ticket and cannot pay the cop on the spot. People are fifteen to sixteen years of age and you cannot blame them for not having this critical worldview. But it’s a problem because that generation will advance through their careers in the next ten years and will form the new pool of professionals that will be drawn upon for jobs, including government officials. So the hope is to get people to start thinking critically about what is going on around them.
Critiquing Russia gives Pavel a feeling of kinship with his father, he says. He does get to talk to his father, once every two weeks when his phone rings and it is his dad on the other end. Mikhail Khodorkovsky gets ten minutes of phone-time.
What do you talk about on the phone?
Mostly family. A lot of times people ask if we discuss current events and politics, and we really don’t. We have similar outlooks, so we are not able to tell each other many new things. It’s only when I travel somewhere and I get the opportunity to meet some of the people that know my father, and they send him their best regards, that I can actually sort of talk about work and politics. But other than that we speak about family. I talk about what his granddaughter is going through right now: she is going to kindergarten; she is speaking both Russian and English. Those things interest him a lot and make him a lot happier than talking about Russian politics.
Since he has never seen his granddaughter, can you send him pictures as well?
Yes. For example, he had his fiftieth birthday on June 26, and straight from the U.S. we sent him a letter package with some postcards and photos. He gets all that and gets the opportunity to see us. Unfortunately we can’t send tangible items because of all sorts of restrictions.
Your father should get out of prison in one year. Do you think that it will happen?
Less than a year. If all is well in eleven months. I try not to guess that far into the future. I am happy that his sentence was reduced. But I think the biggest test is to see if Platon Lebedev gets released, because he’s now due to be released on May 2 next year. If he gets released, my father will probably also get released, because they have identical charges. It’s not that it matters much to the Russian legal system, but if one gets released and the other doesn’t, it will make it procedurally difficult for them to justify it.
How does your father feel about the chance to get out?
He realizes that the possibility of release is tangible, but at the same time he knows that the risks are increasing as that date approaches. Just because there are many different people inside the government who have competing interests. For some, him being released is actually fairly positive news; for others, it’s not. I hope that the ones who think my father’s release would be beneficial will prevail.
If your father gets out of prison, will you go back to Russia?
Yes, but I probably I won’t stay. I would go there first of all to see him, obviously, and people I haven’t been in touch with in person for ten years. It’s going to be nice and I am looking forward to it. But I am not going to drop everything and move to Russia. Let’s say my father were not in jail. That aside, I wouldn’t want to live in Russia, because of my business, my family, the school system... Everything combined, it’s not the best place to be. I do see things that are changing, and luckily they are changing more rapidly, and if the overall quality and security of life are going to improve, I would want to go back home because that’s where I come from.
