Mikhail Khodorkovsky

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Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky, an exiled Russian businessman, philanthropist, and former oligarch, now residing in London, is a professor of the Russian Federation.

Khodorkovsky was regarded as the country's richest man, with a fortune estimated to be worth $15 billion and ranked 16th on Forbes' list of billionaires in 2003.

During the 1980s and 1990s, he had worked his way up the Komsomol plant and founded several companies during the period of glasnost and perestroika.

He accumulated a substantial wealth after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the mid-1990s by uniting several Siberian oil fields under the name Yukos, one of the first major companies to emerge from state-owned privatization efforts in the 1990s (a scheme known as "Loans for Shares"). He was arrested by Russian authorities and charged with criminal activity in October 2003.

Yukos' shares were frozen shortly thereafter on tax charges shortly after the Russian president Vladimir Putin froze them.

Putin's government took further steps against Yukos, leading to the company's decline and the evaporation of a large part of Khodorkovsky's wealth.

In the Soviet Union, the beginnings and entrepreneurship were present.

Boris and Marina Khodorkovsky, Khodorkovsky's parents, were engineers at a Moscow factory making measuring devices. Khodorkovsky's father was Jewish, and his mother was a Russian Orthodox Christian. Both were against Communism, although they kept this from their son, who was born in 1963. The Khodorkovskys were among a generation of well-educated Soviets who were largely in favour of dissidents in the wake of a surge in state anti-Semitism and Stalin's death.

The family lived in a two-room apartment in a concrete block in Moscow's suburbs, and they were moderately successful. Masha Gessen wrote that they faced a dilemma when raising Mikhail: "Speak up about the Soviet Union and risk making your child miserable, with the constant need for doublethink and doublespeak, or attempt to raise a contented conformist." They chose the second path, with outcomes that far exceeded their hopes. Mikhail became a ardent Communist and Soviet patriot, a member of a species that had previously appeared to be extinct.

The young Khodorkovsky was vivacious and received high marks. He served as deputy head of Komsomol (the Communist Youth League) at his university, the D. Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia, where he earned a degree in chemical engineering in 1986. Khodorkovsky married Yelena, a fellow student, while in college. Pavel, their son, was born. In 1986, he met Inna, an 18-year-old undergraduate at the Mendeleev Institute who worked with Khodorkovsky at the Komsomol Institute, who was a friend of Khodorkovsky's at the Komsomol institute. He pleaded guilty and slept in his car until she took him in. They had a daughter and twin sons. He and his first wife were on good terms, and his ex-girlfriend would play a key role in the campaign for his freedom from jail.

After graduating in 1986, Khodorkovsky began working full-time for the Komsomol, which was a common way to begin a Soviet political career. "He could easily be promoted to a junior position in city management someplace far from the capital," Gessen said after several years of mainly relying on Komsomol dues from fellow students."

But rather than following this route, he discovered "quasi-official and often extra-legal business opportunities" and began to build a company career for himself. Khodorkovsky's first venture, a private café, opened in 1986, with partners from Komsomol and technically operating under its control. The venture was made possible by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's program of perestroika and glasnost.

Khodorkovsky was able to gain a foothold in the burgeoning free market thanks to perestroika's arrival. He began his company under Komsomol's disguise with the support of some influential people. Since Golubovich's parents served as governors in Gosbank, the State Bank of the USSR, his friendship with another Komsomol leader, Alexey Golubovich had a major influence on his rising success. "Importing personal computers and, possibly counterfeit alcohol," Khodorkovsky "test his hand" at a number of companies in which he "tried his hand" were two of the items in which he "tried his hand." In addition,, he "enterpended into finance, inventing ways to squeeze money out of the Soviet planned-economy behemoth."

Khodorkovsky and his partners founded a Center for Scientific and Technocreativity of the Youth in 1987. The "scientific" center was involved in the selling of a variety of other products in addition to importing and reselling computers. The institution of Bank Menatep was long considered to have resulted in the establishment of Bank Menatep.

The Bank of New York, which was closely connected with Bruce Rappaport, worked closely with his Menatep, assisting Menatep in registering its shares in the United States. Natasha Gurfinkel Kagalovskaya, who is married to a former Bank Menatep Konstantin Kagalovsky, oversaw the Bank of New York's Eastern European branch, which began in 1992. She had been a banker with Irving Trust since 1986, which was purchased by the Bank of New York in 1988. "Mickey" Galitzine, Vladimir Kirillovich Golitsyn, had previously worked at the Bank of New York and traveled to Russia for the first time in 1990.

Khodorkovsky said:

Khodorkovsky bought the Yukos oil company for about $300 million by a rigged auction during this time. Khodorkovsky later launched a campaign to raise investment funds in other countries, borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars. When the 1998 financial crisis wreaked havoc on Russian citizens, Khodorkovsky defaulted on some of his overseas debt and moved his Yukos shares offshore to shield them from creditors.

Khodorkovsky also served as an economic advisor to Boris Yeltsin's first government. "He was on the barricades in front of Moscow's White House, assisting the government in the failure of 1991's communist hardliners," Gessen wrote. "It is time to stop living," Lenin wrote shortly after, having lost his faith in Communism. Profit is the guiding light, which we're referring to as a result of a strictly legal procedure. Our Lord is His Majesty, Money, for it is only He who will lead us to prosperity as the norm in life."

Khodorkovsky was appointed chairman of the Investment Promotion Fund for the fuel and power industries in 1992. In March 1993, he was elected Deputy Minister of Fuel and Electricity of Russia. Menatep bought Yukos, a large Russian oil producer, with debts in excess of $3.5 billion in 1996.

"Khodorkovsky" made millions in currency trading in the 1990s, according to Gessen. He also bought up privatization vouchers, which were distributed to every Russian citizen and entitleling them to a share of the national wealth—something that many Russians were able to do at a discount for ready cash. Khodorkovsky later acquired majority stakes in 30 companies. In 1995, when Russia hosted its biggest property auction ever, Khodorkovsky was poised to profit from it." The Russian government, as Gessen explained, "actually controlled Russia's major businesses, although they had been restructured, abandoned, or looted by their own administrators." The "new oligarchs," including Khodorkovsky, were struck by a dozen men, who were attempting to borrow funds against collateral made up of blocks of stock that represented controlling interests in those companies. Both the oligarchs and government knew that the government would eventually fail, and that the companies would then pass into the oligarchs' hands. "The Yeltsin administration privatized oil, gas, minerals, and other businesses without parliamentary permission," Gessen wrote. This was how Khodorkovsky came to own Yukos.

When he took possession of Yukos, a conglomerate of more than 20 companies, the majority of them were "in terrible shape," and he loved the job of turning them into fully working units. Khodorkovsky was "the most reticent among the oligarchs," according to Gellin, who did not wish to "buy yachts or villas on the Côte d'Azur" or to become a fixture of "the Moscow playboy scene." To be sure, he bought "a gated complex of seven houses on 50 forested acres about half an hour outside Moscow" in the late 1990s, calling it Apple Orchard and housing Yukos' top executives, who lived together as "one large happy family." His social life was mainly devoted to "Barbecuing for fellow Yukos chiefs." He'll stay up at night and "read until two." "I saw work as a game" during this time, he later wrote. ... You wanted to win the game, but losing was also a possibility. Hundreds of thousands of people came to work in the morning to play with me," the game was a hit.

Nevzlin spoke to Gessen about a time when Khodorkovsky was in Poland on business and the Soviet economic-crimes unit began harassing Nevzlin, who feared being arrested under Soviet-era rules. When Khodorkovsky returned from Poland, he found the situation "terrifying," but "Let me go home, take a shower, get some sleep, and we'll talk about it tomorrow morning." "There was just no way to shake him ever," Nevzlin told Gessen. Khodorkovsky, a man with "an iron will," and "someone dependent on human resources for knowledge and ideas," Nevzlin described him as a "data addict." Although Khodorkovsky "has strong emotions," Nevzlin said, he is capable of turning them off.

He was the president of an online internet bank in Antigua for one week before it fell. Many financial authorities believed it was a fraud.

Khodorkovsky had established an import-export company with a monthly turnover of 80 million rubles (roughly $10 million USD) by 1998. However, he did not fail in the 1998 Russian crash, but Yukos had serious difficulties due to the fall in the price of oil. "Business could no longer be a game" and that "capitalism could make people wealthy and wealthy, but also poor and powerless," he said. "British Communism had sworn off his absolute faith in wealth." After the price of oil soared once more, he established Open Russia, a charity in 2001. It was based at Somerset House in London, with Henry Kissinger as the trustee.

"The primary motivation for the founding of the Open Russia Foundation is the desire to foster increased transparency, knowledge, and integration between the people of Russia and the rest of the world." Its United States debut in Washington, D.C., the following year.

In addition to founding Open Russia, Khodorkovsky "funded Internet cafés in the provinces to encourage people to talk to one another." He sponsored journalism workshops from all around the world. He established a boarding school for disadvantaged children in 1994, and recruited his own parents out of retirement to run it. He was supporting half of all non-governmental organizations in Russia by some accounts, though others said he was funding 80% of them. Yukos pledged $100 million over ten years to the Russian State Humanities University, the country's best liberal-arts academy, the first time a private company had contributed a substantial amount of money to a Russian educational institution.

He also established internet-training centers for teachers, a forum for journalists' discussion of reform and democracy, and foundations that support archaeological digs, cultural exchanges, summer camps for children, and a boarding school for orphanages.

Life in exile (2013–)

Following his pardon and freedom from jail on December 20, 2013, Mikhail Khodorkovsky made only few public appearances before the Ukrainian revolution broke out. Khodorkovsky spoke at Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv, where he accused the Russian government of complicity in the assassination of demonstrators on March 9, 2014.

The Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza awarded Khodorkovsky with the "Man of the Year" award in March 2014. Khodorkovsky gave keynote addresses at the Le Monde Festival, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Oslo Freedom Forum, the World Economic Forum, Stanford University, and the Atlantic Council.

In the summer of 2014, Khodorkovsky's mother died.

The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that the Russian government deliberately bankrupted Yukos to seize its funds and ordered it to pay Yukos shareholders a sum of about $50 billion. About 30,000 former Yukos workers were due to receive a substantial pension from the government. The Russian government hasn't made any payments to Yukos shareholders or employees as of January 2015. The District Court of The Hague quashed the Permanent Court of Arbitration's decision on Monday, finding that it had no jurisdiction as the provisional application of the Energy Charter Treaty arbitration clause breached Russian law.

Khodorkovsky officially revived the Open Russia movement in Kaliningrad, St Petersburg, Voronezh, and Ekaterinburg, among other things, on September 20, 2014, with a live teleconference broadcast starring civil society campaigners and pro-democracy demonstrators. Open Russia was supposed to unite pro-European Russians in an attempt to depose Putin's clout, according to reports at the time of the launch. According to Khodorkovsky, the group will promote independent media, political education, rule of law, support for activists and journalists, free and fair elections, and a scheme to reform law enforcement and the Russian judicial system. Putin's activities were "clearly leading Russia on the patriarchic Asian path to growth," Putin said, and the State Duma was "a bulwark of reactionaries," he said. Open Russia, he said, was ready to assist any candidate who wanted to develop Russia following the European model.

Khodorkovsky spoke at a Washington, D.C., meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in October 2014, delivering the keynote address and making a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "A picture of the West as a sort of moral example for ourselves" had "in the ten to twenty years become much more blurry," he said in the latter speech. "Russia has been wasting time these past ten years, so we will have to make up this lost time," Trump said at Freedom House.

According to a Wall Street Journal article on October 3, Khodorkovsky intends to "bring about a constitutional conference that will move power away from the Russian presidency to the legislature and judiciary." "The issue of Russian power will not be decided by democratic elections will not be determined by presidential elections," he said during his trip to the United States. Forget about it." ... This is why, when we talk about strategic goals, I suggest we have a constitutional conference that will redistribute authority from the president" to other departments of government.

Khodorkovsky spoke to the European Parliament on December 2nd, 2014.

The Guardian announced in December 2014 that Khodorkovsky, a Zurich resident, was "promising the demise of the man who put him behind bars for a decade." According to the journal, Russian intelligence services were monitoring his communications. He denied that he had no intention to run for the presidency or had any political aspirations, but he did have hopes for reforms; not politics, not politics;

Khodorkovsky, as well as other opposition figures, was attacked by Glavplakat, a shadow group in March 2015. Anonymous posters and banners were circulating in Russian cities, ranging from historic figures to disgusting characters from history or naming them as traitors to Russia. It's yet to be decided who is behind the company, and opposition figures are concerned about the attacks.

The Kremlin summoned Khodorkovsky's father for questioning in August 2015. On December 7, 2015, Khodorkovsky was summoned by the Russian Investigative Committee for a official summons.

Khodorkovsky's "Instead of Putin" website, which visitors can vote for alternatives to Putin, was launched in September 2016.

Khodorkovsky was designated as a "foreign agent" by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation on May 2022. Khodorkovsky, together with former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, the head of the US-thinktank Freedom House, the head of the US-funded broadcaster Radio Free Europe, and others, attended the 8th "Russia Forum" in Vilnius in May 2022. The aim of the "anti-Putin summit" was to devise a plan to "deputize" Russia and "slay the Russian bear," referring to Vladimir Putin. Khodorkovsky said in Vilnius that the parliament, not the president, should rule Russia, adding that Putin's government "will not be long in coming."

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