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Danila Galperovich: Hello. This is Glasnost Territory,
and its guests today are well-known Russian political scientists
Lilia Shevtsova and Andrei Piontkovsky.
Andrei Piontkovsky: Hello.
Lilia Shevtsova: Good afternoon.
Danila Galperovich: It is a pleasure to have you in this studio,
and it is a pleasure that we can begin with your impression
as human beings, not as political scientists
of the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev.
You have attended the hearings
and know what has been happening there lately.
Andrei Piontkovsky: You know, after seven years in prison,
these are people who are full of energy and dignity
and who every minute demonstrate their immense intellectual
and moral superiority over state prosecutors.
Most importantly, they are not broken.
They are fighting, not for themselves, but for all of us already.
They are simply showing the absurdity of this entire system,
and I think that a culmination came on the last day
of the testimony of Khodorkovsky, when he went back
to the key moment of his personal conflict
and conflict of principles with Putin.
That was the famous meeting between Putin and representatives
of the business community in the spring of 2003.
I have written about that in the article “A President and an Oligarch.”
That indeed was a culmination
when Khodorkovsky stood up at that meeting and said:
“Mr. President, over the past 10-15 years,
we have somehow created through joint efforts
an utterly crippled and hopeless model of capitalism.
We must work on changing that.
But I cannot do that alone.
To change the system of criminal capitalism,
your bureaucracy needs to be changed.
Your officials take and demand bribes.”
And the second important, key circumstance:
he cited a very specific example:
Vavilov’s company Aurora Borealis,
which had been purchased by Rosneft for a price
that by an order of magnitude exceeded its capitalization.
And by saying that, as subsequent developments showed,
he touched the sore point.
That was a rehearsal of what Putin repeated ten years later
with Abramovich by paying him $13.7 billion
of public money for Sibneft.
Danila Galperovich: Lilia Fyodorovna, what is your take
of the latest events at the trial?
Lilia Shevtsova: I would add this.
You cannot distinguish between things human, social, and historical.
This man and his friend, Platon Lebedev,
were once simply people, simply men, oligarchs,
and they walked the streets and had families, children,
ambitions, money, and what have you – it doesn’t really matter.
But when they found themselves where they are now,
they turned into a factor of history.
Now, very clearly, these two men feel responsible
both for themselves and for us –
thence, the dignity; thence, the irony.
They, indeed, compensate our inability to oppose the system.
Danila Galperovich: Can I interpret your words as meaning that,
irrespective of the role and our attitude toward the role
that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev had, let us say,
in the mid-1990s or early 2000s,
now there has emerged a certain new role,
which is now important for society by what you are saying?
Lilia Shevtsova: Exactly. I think that they realize this.
Moreover, they have not simply become a phenomenon;
they will be the subject of studies in the future
and will be written about just like Yeltsin has been written about,
because their case is a turn in our development,
in the development of our capitalism.
This is the middle of Medvedev’s term.
Have you looked into today’s newspapers?
Of course, you have.
I have read only what our colleagues write.
And what is the general impression?
Humanization of the ruling power –
that is what the new president has brought.
And here we have Khodorkovsky, the shadow of Khodorkovsky.
In fact, Khodorkovsky is like a polygraph test.
His case, his presence, even his silence,
the fact that he is there and not here says:
“Dear Sirs, do not be carried away by wishful thinking.
Things are not the way they look,
and this is not a thaw at all but something totally different.”
Danila Galperovich: Why cannot Medvedev liberate Khodorkovsky and Lebedev?
Lilia Shevtsova: He has no power resource.
Danila Galperovich: How can he have no power resource?
He is president today, is he not?
Lilia Shevtsova: Well, in that case, he does not want to liberate them.
It is either one or the other; tertium non datur.
Danila Galperovich: Andrei Andreyevich, what do you think?
Andrei Piontkovsky: That polygraph test thing –
the image is not even metaphoric but totally concrete:
Who made him [President Medvedev] some two months ago,
I think, look into the camera with his blue eyes
while giving an interview to a Western periodical
and say that he cannot pardon Khodorkovsky?
Danila Galperovich: Both of you are well known to the public
as people who explain to the West how things stand in Russia.
If you undertook now to explain to the West
how things stand with Khodorkovsky’s case,
how would you do that?
Lilia Shevtsova: In a simplified and succinct
and fairly primitive way, I would say this:
Dear managers of BP, Shell, Boeing, etc.,
the fact that Khodorkovsky is in prison means
that you have no guarantees of that
you will keep your property in Russia.
That, perhaps, would make them understand something.
Andrei Piontkovsky: The West does not need any explanations.
It is aware of everything – the situation with both the freedom
of speech and justice and corruption –, and, at least,
the highest leadership of Western countries,
their executive power, is satisfied with that for a number of reasons.
Danila Galperovich: We are expecting that in a foreseeable future,
maybe during this year or maybe even during six months,
the Strasbourg court will rule on the Yukos claim against Russia.
Will that not be a turning point?
Lilia Shevtsova: Danila, here I agree with Andrei in that
the Western elite, and the European political elite first of all,
is comfortable in the role of, let us say,
people who connive at the Russian regime.
But there is the Western public opinion;
there is a portion of the PACE, which you,
by the way, observe from the inside;
there is the U.S. Congress, which, by the way,
has considered the question of how to punish the people,
those 60 Russian officials,
including some from the General Prosecutor’s Office,
who have killed Sergei Magnitsky.
And the public opinion is the electoral resource
that can influence Western politicians.
Danila Galperovich: Can such specific things,
including the trial of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev,
change the public opinion and influence politicians further?
Andrei Piontkovsky: I do not think that a Western government
will react to its public opinion so quickly,
in a future historically foreseeable for our prisoners.
In this case, we are interested, as you have rightly stressed,
in the possibility to exert pressure on the Kremlin
through the claims that are considered by the European Court.
By the way, Kremlin lobbyists have found a very elegant solution here.
As is known Russian businessmen have sent donations
that are enormous by European standards to the universities
from which members of the court have graduated.
Danila Galperovich: I will tell you more.
The funniest thing is that when the information appeared
in the media around the world, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov,
speaking about politically motivated, in his opinion,
decisions of the European Court, said that many countries
try to influence the judges personally
while Russia does not do so and calls on others not to do so.