MOSCOW, June 24 (RIA Novosti) - Jailed former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky would have committed suicide before his arrest a decade ago if he had known about his future convictions and life behind bars, he has told a Russian newspaper.
“I’m afraid I would have shot myself,” he said in an interview with The New Times published on Monday. “My current experience would have been a shock to me back then.”
Russia’s richest man in the early 2000s, after building his Yukos oil company into Russia’s largest crude producer, Khodorkovsky accused President Vladimir Putin’s government of rampant corruption and lavishly funded opposition parties.
Khodorkovsky was himself a controversial figure, who had been accused by some Western investors, notably Kenneth Dart, of diluting minority shareholders’ stakes in Yukos.
In 2003, Khodorkovsky was arrested by armed police special forces that stormed his private jet on a refueling stop in Siberia. He was in talks with US oil giant ExxonMobil about that company possibly buying a major stake in Yukos just before he was arrested, Bloomberg reported at the time.
In 2005, he was sentenced to eight years in jail for fraud and tax evasion. In 2010, he had his prison term extended until 2017 (later reduced by two years) for allegedly stealing $30 billion worth of oil from Yukos.
Both trials were widely seen as retaliation for challenging Putin, though the Russian government insisted his offenses were criminal and not political in nature. Analysts saw the bankruptcy and de facto nationalization of Yukos, Russia’s largest and fastest-growing oil company, as the centerpiece of the Kremlin’s reestablishment of control over Russia's strategic energy sector.
After a decade in jail, Khodorkovsky, who turns 50 on Wednesday, has tried to transform his image in the public consciousness from an unpopular oligarch into a crusading, dissident figure. While frequently lambasting Putin and his regime, he works on research into Russia’s oil industry and often writes about finding God, opposing tyranny and surviving in Russia’s jails.
“There are no friends in jail, and you should beware those who are trying to befriend you,” he was quoted as saying by the paper, while describing his life in a penal colony outside the northwestern town of Segezha 900 kilometers (540 miles) from Moscow.
Khodorkovsky has become Russia’s most vocal and renowned convict and has even penned a series of articles about the inmates and law enforcement officials he has met.
In one of his articles, he called the Russian courts “part of the law-enforcement assembly line” that convicts tens of thousands of Russians every year.
Russia has the world’s third-largest prison population after the United States and China. It also has a 99 percent conviction rate, according to legal experts and human rights organizations – higher than during the Stalin era.
Khodorkovsky says he has trouble sleeping after an inmate stabbed him in the face in 2006. “I wake up when I am looked at,” he was quoted by The New Times as saying.
The inmate, Alexander Kuchma, initially claimed the former tycoon tried to sexually harass him. But after his release, Kuchma claimed that the prison authorities had forced him to attack and then accuse Khodorkovsky.
Khodorkovsky claimed the Kremlin-controlled media has mounted a smear campaign against him, and said he still cannot bear being apart from his wife and children.
“First, I could not stand reading and hearing how they called me a crook, how they destroyed Yukos, how they pursue people [who worked for Yukos], it hurt to see how [my] family suffers,” he was quoted as saying.
“The only thing I cannot get used to is separation from family,” he was quoted as saying.
