The Russia Conundrum

But Putin was dissembling: it turned out he didn’t really believe the liberal views he was spouting. He was simply saying the right words to lull me into believing he was a liberal like myself. And for a while it worked. I persisted in giving Putin the benefit of the doubt. Even when he said terrible things – things that showed he really didn’t care about the lives of individual Russian citizens – it took me a long time to understand that he was a cunning liar and hypocrite. When Putin responded to the dreadful tragedy of the Kursk submarine with an uncaring shrug and a throwaway put-down, ‘So OK, it sank’, I convinced myself he had just made a slip in the emotion of the moment; and when he was reported as calling the protesting widows of the dead sailors ‘ten-dollar whores’, I made myself believe it was a fabrication by his outspoken opponent, Boris Berezovsky. When Moscow apartment blocks started to get blown up in late 1999, conveniently just in time for Putin – who was then prime minister – to use the bombings as a pretext for his military intervention in Chechnya, I refused to believe the terrible rumours of a conspiracy. Surely, it really must have been terrorists, I told myself; surely the bags of leftover explosives they found were just dummies from some training exercise … But more and more facts began to accumulate, until in the end I could no longer deny the truth.

In the early part of Putin’s reign, my Kremlin connections meant I was on hand when the new president needed guidance. The inexperienced Putin was initially good at asking for and taking advice. He certainly said all the right things, reaffirming his commitment to democracy, internationalism and reform. Looking back, I do wonder how I managed to get him so wrong. Did he genuinely believe in the liberal values he proclaimed, and did he then change as the years went by? Or did he never really mean what he said? If it were the latter – which I now believe to be the case – how did Putin manage to take me in, and manage to convince many others who supported democracy in Russia that he was the man to secure it? My only answer is that I think Putin is very good at being all things to all men. His technique is to look at you and mirror what you are saying. He tells people what he knows they want to hear. If you’re conservative, he makes out that he’s a conservative, too; if you’re a liberal, then he makes sure he comes over as a liberal. He’s a chameleon who leaves everyone thinking he’s on their side, a powerful trick for a politician determined to get his way at any cost. It goes a long way to explaining why the West started out believing that Putin was going to continue the sympathetic, market-oriented, democratic policies of Boris Yeltsin. But, after a while, it became clear that Putin wasn’t the open-minded liberal he’d seemed to be. That is when I began to realise he wasn’t a man I could support; and that’s what led to the public confrontation between us.

Because I was, first and foremost, a businessman, and my involvement in politics was sporadic, it was no coincidence that my challenge to Putin came over questions of business. After the crash of 1998, I had recast Yukos as an open, transparent, rules-based entity, capable of matching Western standards in all areas. It saved us as a company and brought us considerable success in the years that followed. I came to believe passionately that the same recipe could rescue not just Russian business, but the Russian state itself; and I felt it was my duty to convey the message to anyone who would listen. In numerous speeches and articles, I promoted the need for a new approach to standards of politics and governance, calling for an end to the ingrained practices of economic corruption and social coercion, the pillaging of the national economy for personal gain and the repression of free expression, that Putin’s administration had increasingly come to rely on.