No Country for Honest Men

Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s prison memoirs and Karen Dawisha’s scholarly Putin exposé tackle the subject of Russian corruption from different angles.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the epitome of the Russian capitalism of the 1990s, laundering Soviet credits into cash currency and making millions and then billions. “Our compass is profit,” he declared in a manifesto co-authored with his business partners. He obtained the oil conglomerate Yukos after Boris Yeltsin’s government put up shares of the company as collateral on a massive loan, on which it predictably defaulted–a scheme that sidestepped anti-privatization laws. By the time Khodorkovsky was arrested 2003, he was the richest man in Russia but no longer the personification of capitalism.

His prison memoirs, My Fellow Prisoners, were published in English in February. They are one of a growing library of books written by journalists, businessmen, academics and dissidents which shed light on the system established by Putin. Another recent addition to this catalog, published in September 2014, is Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?, an academic work that more baldly displays its thesis in the title. The pair of books, the first one contemplative and personal and the second forthright and research-heavy, are each set in a land where corporate and national intrigue intertwine.

Khodorkovsky may have accumulated vast fortunes using enterprising schemes, but the 2003 charges of fraud and tax evasion were a means to an end rather than punishment for his business practices. The Kremlin’s targeting of him came after he involved himself in politics. A man of more than one ideological transformation–having been previously converted from Communism to market-based idols–Khodorkovsky underwent another shift in the years just before Putin’s ascent to the presidency. No longer believing in the absolute uplifting power of capitalist enterprise, he started the Open Russia foundation and funded Internet cafés, independent media and arts education. He was now politically dangerous to the Kremlin’s way of doing business.

Khodorkovsky now represents another, vastly different consequence of Russian politics and power than he did in the 1990s: targeted and imprisoned by the same system that originally allowed him to rise to such wealth. My Fellow Prisoners is a small volume — fewer than 100 pages profiling other men whose paths he crossed while behind bars. Khodorkovsky uses their stories to expand upon elements of his own personal saga and to make broader points about Russian politics. Although Khodorkovsky has written other books, this is the first to be published in English. Khodorkovsky was released in late 2013 and now lives in Switzerland as one of Putin’s vocal critics-in-exile.

N.N. is one of the profiled fellow prisoners, and he merits his own chapter because he was a rat–a thief who stole from other inmates. Acting on their suspicions, the prisoners broke open N.N.’s locker and found inside a hoarded pile of their food, an accumulation so great that the rat could not have eaten it all himself nor could he have reasonably hoped to keep his prolific, perhaps compulsive, looting a secret for very much longer. The thief’s illogical, self-destructive greed serves as a metaphor for Khodorkovsky of how Russia itself works. “The pilfering just keeps going on,” he writes. The entire system is run like this, like the man hoarding other people’s food beyond the point of his own benefit.

Khodorkovsky’s own legal battles reflect this. After his arrest, controlling share of Yukos’ core production facility was won at auction by a previously unknown company named Baikalfinansgrup. The company was lent more than $9 billion for the purchase by Rosneft, a government-owned oil company currently under sanction by the United States and European Union. Days later, Rosneft bought Baikalfinansgrup — a sleight of hand that allowed the government to protect itself from being sued for participation in a rigged auction. In July of 2014, a tribunal in the Hague called the liquidation and absorption of the company a “devious and calculated expropriation,” and awarded Yukos’ largest shareholder, the Menatep Group, $50 billion. The Kremlin is appealing the ruling.

Khodorkovsky’s politics and prominence make him visible and exceptional, but between 2002 and 2012 nearly three million entrepreneurs were imprisoned in Russia. Often as not, their imprisonments were unjust, spurred on by rivals taking advantage of a corrupt legal system where more than 99 percent of criminal cases return a guilty verdict and police can be bribed to plant evidence.

At one point in My Fellow Prisoners, Khodorkovsky marvels that many Russians still believe in the moral standing of the judges and law enforcement. “I will admit, of course,” he writes, “that many representatives of these professions, in their personal lives, are entirely decent citizens who, like the rest of us, lie only occasionally…. When they’re at work and part of ‘the system’ however, they lie virtually all the time, and as a rule tell the truth only to gain someone’s trust — which then enables them to lie more successfully afterwards. They lie to individuals, to the court, to one another. These are the rules of a system which, if for this reason alone, needs to be dismantled. It just isn’t a place where honest people can function.”

Russia has been no country for honest men for a while, despite its outwardly democratic pretensions. The West turned a particularly critical eye following Putin’s aggressions in Ukraine in 2014 and his brazen fulfillment of revanchist fantasy in the annexation of Crimea, but Russia’s leader has been solidifying control over a corruption-riddled state since he assumed office in 1999 as president-in-waiting, and even before that. As Masha Gessen wrote in her Putin biography The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, he “put Khodorkovsky behind bars for the same reason that he abolished elections or had [Alexander] Litvinenko killed: in his continuing attempt to turn the country into a supersize model of the KGB, there can be no room or dissidents or even for independent actors.”

The argument that contemporary Russia is built on a system built to push out honesty is essentially Miami University professor Karen Dawisha’s point in Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?. Gessen, in The Man Without a Face determines Putin’s personal disorder to be not kleptomania, but rather pleonexia –the profound desire to acquire that which others rightfully have. Either way, the point stands: the thuggishly acquisitive manner in which Putin has conducted himself–like when he purloined Patriots’ owner Robert Kraft’s diamond-encrusted Super Bowl ring in 2005–is writ large in the political system that orbits around him.

Figuring out who Vladimir Putin really is or how he thinks has been a massive effort in both Russia and the West for years now. One of the more desperate-sounding efforts at Putinology comes from a Pentagon attempt to use “movement patterns analysis” to assess his character from video footage — concluding that he might have Asperger’s syndrome or have suffered from a stroke in utero. He is an easy subject of fascination, a man made mostly of personally crafted myth, from his chummy relationship with the ultranationalist Night Wolves biker gang to his KGB past. He is often brash–once famously promising that in the hunt for terrorists Russia would “wipe them out in the outhouse”–and self-promotional to the point of absurdity. For all the photos of him horseback riding without his shirt, he carries immense personal power rooted in corruption, cronyism and violence.

Putin’s Kleptocracy does not often stop to marvel at the absurdity as it rattles off names and crimes; it is a prosaic deconstruction of Putin’s mafiosi craftsmanship. In this, it stands in contrast to Masha Gessen’s 2012 biography of him, which is perhaps equally damnatory in its tone but is much more personal, emotional and literary in its execution.

Dawisha’s hefty indictment of Putin’s autocratic rule rejects the idea that Russia under his authority ever held the chance of being democratic. He has, she argues, from the very first, crafted a system designed to look outwardly like a democracy but function to the benefit of Putin and his inner circle. Huge portions of the book are dedicated to enumerating sins he committed prior to assuming the presidency, and she details meticulously the ways in which Putin’s early career set solid groundwork for the system in place today. She writes that during the 1990s, just before he took office, it was “possible to see the shape and direction of his entire rule from this early period.”

Putin’s Kleptocracy is often a chronicle of one after another: crony after crony, racket after racket. An influential, shadowy figure from the deep bench of Putin loyalists is Igor Sechin. “Of all Putin’s lieutenants,” Dawisha writes, “Sechin was the one with the reputation for the greatest loyalty.” It was this loyalty that propelled the former spy to control of Rosneft, outlining some of the dark motivations that undergirded Khodorkovsky’s fall from Kremlin grace. As she puts it, companies like Yukos “didn’t become state companies so much as they became Putin’s friends’ companies.”

Dawisha’s work relies intensely on that of others, although not without due acknowledgement. Putin’s Kleptocracy at points reads something like a case file: an accumulation of evidence and grievance, as if prepared for a moment of reckoning, a catalog not just of criticism but of almost legalistic proof. It is dizzying in its diligence — the extensive quotations from interviews and analysis, the references to the investigative reporting of outlets like Novaya Gazeta, and the descriptions laid out end-to-end of Putin loyalists and the shady dealings he supported and cultivated since his time working in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office and the Presidential Property Management Department. Putin’s Kleptocracy is not particularly narrative and the cumulative effect can be overwhelming, but it is forcefully effective in achieving its overall point. From beginning to end, Putin stands accused.

This was not uncontroversial. The book was initially set to be published by Cambridge University Press, where Dawisha has published other work. In April of last year, however, the publishing house backed out fearing a libel suit, sending Dawisha a letter reading, in part: “…given the controversial subject matter of the book, and its basic premise that Putin’s power is founded on his links to organised crime, we are not convinced that there is a way to rewrite the book that would give us the necessary comfort.” The book went on to be published by Simon & Schuster instead. Putin’s Kleptocracy is unabashed in its litany of Putin’s sins, but when paired with My Fellow Prisoners and read in the light of news out of Russia, it does not seem worrisomely edgy so much as dead on.

Both books seek to convey a fundamental argument about the impact of distortion at the heart of Russian politics–in the judicial system, in economic policy, in elections and information control. Published in the context of rising concern outside of Russia about Putin’s rule, driven most recently by the Crimean annexation and the contract killing of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, both My Fellow Prisoners and Putin’s Kleptocracy unearth the ways in which Putin constructed a Russia with a reimagined sense of authoritarianism and injustice.