Khodorkovsky's Offer To Putin.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed Russian oil tycoon, got a 3,000-word article published on March 29 by the daily business newspaper Vedomosti in which he indirectly offered a deal with Putin. He lamented the decline of liberal democracy in Russia while acknowledging the part that he and other business leaders played in that decline in the tumultuous years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Making his most extensive public remarks since his arrest last October, Khodorkovsky said Russia's largest companies needed to accept higher taxes on natural resources in order to legitimise the privatisation deals of the 1990s. His remarks represented an important shift in his position on at least one significant issue.

Only a year ago, as chairman of Yukos Oil, Khodorkovsky lobbied extensively against higher oil taxes in what was widely seen as a rebuff to Putin's Kremlin. His efforts to influence politics reportedly angered the Kremlin and have been widely cited as one of the precipitating causes of the criminal investigation that has landed him and other Yukos shareholders in prison or in exile on what his supporters say are politically motivated charges.

Khodorkovsky, facing $1 bn in fraud and tax evasion charges, thus turned on his former allies among the liberal business elite and praised Putin. In what appears to be an attempt to gain a more lenient approach in his case, he said the liberals had only themselves to blame for their decline. He argued that Putin deserved support as someone who while "probably neither a liberal nor a democrat is more liberal and democratic than 70% of our population" and a guarantor of "the stability of our country" who limited the influence of nationalist forces. The comments distanced him from some of his own business partners, notably including Leonid Nevzlin, who fled Russia and criticised Putin during an investigation into the business affairs of Yukos, Russia's biggest oil company, which Khodorkovsky controlled before his incarceration.

Khodorkovsky wrote that the only way liberalism as a political force could regain the trust of ordinary Russians was by sharing with society the profits of the highly questionable privatisation deals that left a few privileged insiders like himself fabulously wealthy. "It has to be admitted that 90% of the Russian people do not consider privatisation fair and those who benefited from it legal owners", Khodorkovsky wrote, without mentioning his own privatisation deals, which have brought him wealth that Forbes magazine recently estimated to exceed $15 bn.

It is still unclear whether Khodorkovsky's article will have any influence on his criminal case. Earlier last month, a court in Moscow once again extended his detention on charges of tax evasion and fraud, ensuring his imprisonment at least until the end of May.

Khodorkovsky did not address the charges he faces, but the tone of his remarks, including his acceptance of blame for some of the excesses of Russia's transition to capitalism, suggested a degree of contrition, though perhaps a calculated one. The NYT reported a former aide who has worked closely with him as saying the article reflected Khodorkovsky's attempt to reach out to Putin and the authorities. "He is saying, 'I will do what it takes to stand down'", the former aide said, according to the NYT. "The question is what will it take". Since his arrest, Khodorkovsky has made only brief remarks on the fringes of his intermittent court hearings. His article suggested he had spent much of his time in "solitary confinement Cell No. 4" at Matroskaya Tishina prison in Moscow considering the evolution of politics and business in Russia.

Writing beneath the title "The Crisis of Liberalism in Russia", Khodorkovsky said Russia's two liberal parties, Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces, were themselves to blame for their devastating defeat in the December 2003 parliamentary election, where they failed to cross the 5% threshold of votes to ensure a bloc of seats. He said Russia's liberals - "with whom I place my sinful self" - failed to anticipate nationalist and historical trends in Russia and ignored the interests of Russians left behind in the post-Soviet transition.

In what appeared to be a critique of his own promotional efforts abroad, Khodorkovsky said liberals needed to stop seeking support from the US and Europe and to seek it instead from ordinary Russians. (Briefly after his arrest, his supporters floated the idea of his own presidential challenge to Putin, an idea that quickly evaporated). He said liberals should "give up meaningless attempts to doubt the legitimacy of President Putin", reflecting the country's desire for stability. He said he refused to join in supporting the presidential candidacy of Irina Khakamada, the sole liberal who unsuccessfully challenged Putin by warning of growing nationalistic sentiment. "Yes, Putin is probably neither a liberal nor a democrat", Khodorkovsky wrote, "but he is more liberal and more democratic than 70% of the population".

The FT said on March 30 Khodorkovsky's views were shared by many Russian analysts and politicians, and that he had even voiced some of them in the past in private. The FT quoted Boris Makarenko, a political analyst, as saying Khodorkovsky's public statement showed "clear symptoms of an attempt to reconcile with Putin".

While making no specific references to the criminal charges against him, Khodorkovsky was far less strident in his defence of the privatisations, including the one by which he gained control of Yukos. The FT quoted a former employee of Khodorkovsky as saying: "This shows his efforts to express his own thoughts after he has been deprived of his voice. He still has to persuade people that these are not just games. The chances he will be released on bail are very small".

Lawyers acting for Khodorkovsky and the Menatep group of companies were on March 29 reported as saying they would appeal to Switzerland's supreme court against a formal decision on March 25 by the Swiss authorities to freeze accounts worth billions of francs at Russia's request. Russian prosecutors say the frozen cash amounts to SFr6.2bn, although the Swiss federal prosecutor's office said only that "several billion Swiss francs" were involved. According to Menatep's lawyers, the blocked funds include hundreds of millions of US dollars in a Yukos pension fund and several operational accounts for Menatep companies.