Valery Panuyshkin talks about Mikhail Khodorkovsky to the responsive people of Yekaterinburg.

On March 23, Valery Panyushkin visited the city at the invitation of Sverdlovsk’s. Young Yabloko group. He met with students from the Urals State University and with journalists, with an audience from the School of Public Politics and with readers of Prisoner of Silence. He also gave several TV and radio interviews.

Ekho Moskvy in Yekaterinburg

Our guest is the well-known Russian journalist, Vedomosti columnist and author of a book about Mikhail Kodorkovsky, Prisoner of Silence - Valery Panyushkin. It’s been a year now, I think, since Prisoner of Silence was released. Looking back, as we can now, are you happy with it, and with readers’ responses to it?

Of course not. To be completely satisfied with what you do, you have to be member of United Russia - which I’m not. So I’m not happy with it.

I’m interested in your reasons. Why did you write a book about Khodorkovsky? You must have known that most people would start saying ‘He was paid to do it; it was done on Khodorkovsky’s orders’.

There are several factors here. First, every Kremlinologist dreams of writing a book. [He laughs] Every journalist dreams of writing a book about something important. This was an important story. But few journalists ever get the chance because they work for newspapers - and daily deadlines leavesone with no time for oneself. A publishing-house paid me - not Khodorkovsky. The publishing-house paid to allow me three months off.

Why did the publishing-house approach you? Did it know you were interested in the subject, that you were dreaming of writing a book about it? ‘So here’s the money. Write it’. Is that how it was?

I like to think that the publishing-house approached me because it knew how good I was. [He laughs] I don’t know why it approached me straight off the bat. My position was clear.

And what was it exactly? Explain it to those who haven’t yet had a chance to read the book.

My position, in brief, is that Khodorkovsky may have been guilty, but that wasn’t why he was put in prison.

That was for something else.

Something else.

Does your book go into this? This something else?

To put it succinctly, Mikhail Khodorkovsky tried to find a new way to make money, to make - if you like - more. To do this, he opted for a new strategy as far as the country was concerned, the launch of his company onto the free market. [Exactly what everyone is trying to do now - Press Centre.] Now if a company becomes transparent, it’s like cleaning a window - you can look through it and see what’s going on inside. The problem with Yukos was that you could look through it and see what was going on in Russian politics and the Russian economy. Lenin, as you remember, said that politics were a concentrated form of economics. So people simply couldn’t be allowed to see inside where the two met

So, Valery, you believe that Khodorkovsky was jailed for economic, rather than political reasons? Because the mainstream view, as I understand it, is that it was because of his political ambitions. He may not have made them public, but he stopped hiding them and paid a price for it. He was after the presidency.

Nonsense! ‘I now declare that I mean to become President. . .’

Valery, why are you more interested in Khodorkovsky than in, say, Abramovich or Berezovsky? You could write books about them too - and there’d likely be more demand for them, since they’re more public and less political characters.

One could, of course. Abramovich would make a very juicy story.

He’s currently going through a bit of a shake-up in his private life.

Quite! Actually there’s a very simple explanation - neither of them is in prison. The fact of the matter is that I’m not interested in Khodorkovsky per se - for all his philosophizing about Open Russia. There are still a lot of people I find much more interesting than him.

So you were more interested in researching the situation.

I was interested in someone trapped in an extreme situation and in the extreme situation going on in our lives. Imagine that an epidemic of plague has broken out in a city, and you write a book about the plague, about what it is, how people catch it, how many get over it and what you have to do to do so. After the book’s out, the author is asked: ‘Why didn’t you write about ulcers?’. Guys, I wrote about plague because the city has been struck by plague. If the city had been struck by an epidemic of ulcers, I’d have written about that.

What’s the upshot, in brief, of this story? Will he be released in two to three thousand days?

I think not. Why should he be released all of a sudden?

Why not? The job’s been done. He could be allowed to leave the country, for example.

You have to understand, he’s not in jail because of the law, and he won’t be let out in accordance with it. He’ll be let out either when the situation has changed appreciably or when the Kremlin decides to reassess it - or maybe he’ll be killed. I don’t know. . .

(Ekho Moskvy in Yekaterinburg, host Maxim Putintsev, aired 23.03.2007)