22 years ago – how time flies – I wrote a report on Russian...
Mikhail Khodorkovsky@khodorkovsky_en
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Feb 21, 2025
~3 min read
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22 years ago – how time flies – I wrote a report on Russian corruption. I told Putin about corruption in his circle, gave examples.
I asked him directly: does Putin want 25% of his compatriots to consider the Russian President a bribe-taker?
🧵What happened after showed I thought better of him than he deserved. 1/9
I asked him directly: does Putin want 25% of his compatriots to consider the Russian President a bribe-taker?
🧵What happened after showed I thought better of him than he deserved. 1/9
3:31
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It was the first anti-corruption investigation before it became mainstream! Social media wasn't really a thing back then, so I had to present it personally at the Kremlin, where he met with the business community. 2/9
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Soon after, I was arrested on made-up charges. The accusation was ridiculous: stealing oil from my own company, Yukos. That speech would cost me 10 years of my life. 3/9
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We always underestimate Vladimir Putin’s worst qualities. Back then, almost three years into his presidency, as informed as I was, when I was preparing the report I couldn’t even imagine that the President of Russia was so deep in the weeds of corruption. 4/9
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Twenty years later, the world underestimated Putin’s ability to wage a bloody war. And nobody can guarantee that this man’s second, third, tenth nadir will be his last.
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The year 2003 was the moment of truth for Putin’s system, when it used the Yukos affair to declare, absolutely transparently, its methods and appetites. 6/9
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This would only keep on growing later (ending with the start of the war), but in 2003 we saw only the first steps. Some of us saw them from behind bars:
– Law, including international law, is nothing. If you really want to do something, you can
– The right of the strong declared itself brazenly, demonstratively and in full voice. The philosophy and methods were conveyed by Ostankino
– The state has essentially been turned into a tool for settling personal scores and achieving personal goals. Everyone else took it on the chin and acted like this was the sovereign’s business
– People’s lives and fates are expendable materials: they killed Aleksanyan in prison, and have been holding Pichugin prisoner for almost 22 years.
7/9
– Law, including international law, is nothing. If you really want to do something, you can
– The right of the strong declared itself brazenly, demonstratively and in full voice. The philosophy and methods were conveyed by Ostankino
– The state has essentially been turned into a tool for settling personal scores and achieving personal goals. Everyone else took it on the chin and acted like this was the sovereign’s business
– People’s lives and fates are expendable materials: they killed Aleksanyan in prison, and have been holding Pichugin prisoner for almost 22 years.
7/9
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The day after the meeting in the Kremlin, Kommersant newspaper published an account of the event by Putin’s biographer Andrey Kolesnikov. It began like this:
“Vladimir Putin announced that he wanted to talk about corruption. The goal was to root it out. But not by punitive methods. One must simply create rules that are easier to follow than to break. And if the system of public administration starts to work at full capacity in the economy… that is the particular hope of the head of state”.
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“Vladimir Putin announced that he wanted to talk about corruption. The goal was to root it out. But not by punitive methods. One must simply create rules that are easier to follow than to break. And if the system of public administration starts to work at full capacity in the economy… that is the particular hope of the head of state”.
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Rooted out? The corrupt officials of 22 years ago are children by today’s standards. All that has happened is the complete subordination of not only the economy, but the entire life of the country, to the state. We have followed this path step by step, all the way to a war of aggression.
I have always done what I could to hinder this process. I will continue to do so.
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I have always done what I could to hinder this process. I will continue to do so.
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