On Thursday, Russia’s federal NTV television channel aired a special titled “Anatomy of a Protest” that accused the Russian opposition of paying people to take part in their protests and other dubious practices. Oppositionists and bloggers have since summarily ripped the production apart, but for the majority of the Russian population that gets its news from state-controlled television, the misinformation has already been spread. In this brief statement, United Civil Front leader Garry Kasparov explains why he won’t be participating on an upcoming NTV program on jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Boycott NTV!
By Garry Kasparov
March 16, 2012
Kasparov.ru

Two days ago, I unexpectedly received an invitation from Anton Khrekov to appear on the program “NTVshniki” to discuss an equally unexpected topic – whether or not it’s time to release Khodorkovsky.

It’s well known that anything discussed on federal television, let alone as toxic a topic for the government as this one, is only aired after being painstakingly censored. It’s also well known that the government is currently trying to create the illusion that there is some amount of public discourse, in an attempt to dampen the intensity of the opposition protests. Nevertheless, having overcome my initial instinctual disgust, I decided all the same to accept the invitation, hoping that at least some of my words in defense of Khodorkovsky and other political prisoners could manage to survive to the program’s montage.

However, yesterday’s display of crude falsities on the program “Anatomy of a Protest” flaunted even the entirely lax standards of tidiness that NTV has taken upon itself. As a result, any decent person can see that cooperation with this channel in any form is simply not possible.

On the eve of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to Russia next week, jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky spoke to the Telegraph about issues he hoped would be raised – including corruption, the independence of the judicial system, and the protection of human rights.

Andrew Osborn: How would you advise David Cameron to deal with Mr Medvedev and Mr Putin during his visit? Which issues of concern do you think he should raise in particular and how?

Mikhail Khodorkovsky: I have always believed that there are many areas where the UK and Russia can be partners in a way that benefits both nations. Prime Minister David Cameron and President Dmitry Medvedev are representatives of one and the same political generation, the one that came into its own after the Cold War and the era of global confrontation between the superpowers had ended. For this reason alone it is perhaps easier for them to reach agreement, having found points of contact and compromises with respect to the majority of questions during the British Premier’s upcoming visit to Moscow.

As things stand today, it seems to me that Dmitry Medvedev has a sufficiently realistic assessment of the current situation in Russia. Although in terms of economic and political reform little has changed over the 3.5 years he has been in the Kremlin, this does not mean that reform is impossible. More likely it is even inevitable – the question is only whether it will take place with Medvedev’s leadership or without it.

Given Mr Cameron’s visit is dedicated, first and foremost, to the cooperation of the UK and Russia in the field of the economy, as well as to investments, I would hope that the British Prime Minister will directly raise questions of corruption and the judicial system in the RF with President Medvedev. I presume that it will be difficult for anyone to expect British companies to do serious business in Russia whilst entrepreneurs are factually subjected to a bureaucratic racket and international investors are under the threat of a repeat of the fate of YUKOS or Hermitage Capital. I know that the UK’s new Bribery Act – for which I commend Britain and Premier Cameron personally – now makes it illegal for UK companies to engage in the system of bribes and backhanders that exists in Russia. At the same time, foreign investors in Russia cannot count on effective judicial protection of their interest as of yet. And it will be difficult for western leaders to encourage their companies to go into Russia whilst there is a risk that the investors will become victims of the current system of total corruption and judicial arbitrariness.

AO: Do you think Britain has any leverage with Russia when it comes to human rights issues? If so, what could Britain do to apply pressure to Russia to get it to change for the better?

MK: There is no question that such leverage does exist. The most influential people in Russia, those who in large measure determine the image and the fate of the country today, have vast business and personal interests in the UK. This applies also to a series of significant representatives of Vladimir Putin’s team. Now as concerns President Medvedev, he has proclaimed a course towards a “reset” in relations with the West, and in this process Britain plays one of the most important roles. Therefore London can perfectly well raise with Moscow acute and not always convenient questions connected with Russian corruption, ensuring the independence of the judicial system and the protection of human rights.

To my view, the UK could let Russia understand that a country with such scales of corruption, the only G8 country where there are political prisoners, cannot be a full-fledged and all-around partner. That not only the foreign-economic relations of Russia and the West are important, but also real steps by the Russian leadership aimed at transforming my country into a modern European state. That true trust is possible between democracies, but not between a developed democracy, on the one hand, and an authoritarian regime of a half-Soviet, half-Asiatic type – on the other, and that, although Russia is interesting as a source of raw materials under any regime, cooperation in large-scale modernisation is possible only if there exists a commonality of values.

AO: Do you think that Britain and the West in general is guilty of appeasing Russia because of Moscow’s status as the world’s largest exporter of energy?

MK: As mentioned, your government has always been willing to speak out not just on general human rights issues in Russia, but in my case in particular for which I will always be grateful. Equally we all understand diplomatic reality and it would make no sense and would not be helpful for the UK to strike up a confrontational pose against Russia, even though in contrast to other European states, Britain’s’ reliance on Russian energy is relatively not great.

But the importance of Russia as an economic counterparty should surely encourage the UK to be concerned about bringing the values of the two countries closer together. The “Arab Spring” showed that the struggle for freedom and democracy has become the lot of all countries and peoples. That corrupt authoritarian regimes are not eternal, although the leaders of such regimes can be convinced of the opposite for quite a long time. That the demand for democracy, for honest and open government has become global. And the leading countries of the West – of which the UK, indubitably, is one – will retain and strengthen their political and, what is no less important, their moral leadership in the modern world if they will meet this growing, all-pervading demand on the part of many millions of people worldwide. This concerns British-Russian relations as well.

Alexander Kuchma has long been known as the man who slashed Khodorkovsky’s face with a cobbler’s knife, claiming that “I wanted to cut his eye out, but my hand slipped.” At the time, the incident gave rise to speculation that Soviet-era tactics of recruiting mentally unstable prisoners to attack others were being employed against the jailed oligarch.

Indeed, on May 16, 2011, just months after finishing a seven-year sentence for armed robbery, Kuchma told Gazeta.ru that he had been forced to carry out the attack. He did not, however, name names. Shortly afterwards, an unnamed federal television channel paid Kuchma “a certain sum of money” and shot a ten-minute interview where he recounts the story of how he was made to carry out the attack – this time, complete with specific names and dates.

Kuchma was then told by an employee of the channel that the interview would not be aired because it had “caused alarm and was being reviewed by the general director.” A representative of the channel told Gazeta.ru that it may still be aired at a later time.

Fearing for his life, Kuchma again phoned Gazeta.ru and retold his story, complete with the details he’d given in the filmed interview. “After they taped the broadcast, I decided to tell you everything sooner than they could come crashing down on me,” Kuchma told editors. “What do they need me for if I’ve already told everything?”

In the interview with Gazeta.ru, published on Thursday, Kuchma explains how two law enforcement officers organized the 2006 attack on Khodorkovsky. The website stipulates that, in the spirit of innocent until proven guilty, they have changed the names and certain positions published in the article – but are prepared to release them in the case of an investigation. They also note that fact-checking has found that the people named by Kuchma indeed either worked or still work for the Federal Penitentiary System.

The incident began in March 2006, when Khodorkovsky and Kuchma were placed in disciplinary confinement as punishment for drinking tea. Shortly afterwards, two officers met Kuchma in a separate room and began beating him almost immediately. “They started saying I should take revenge on Khodorkovsky for supposedly getting me put in the disciplinary cell. They said that I should take a knife and stab him in the eye, like to stab it out. The plan was such that I needed to attack him in his sleep,” said the former prisoner. “I told them: ‘What are you getting at, guys? He’ll die.'”

“The first time I didn’t agree, they called me back, beat me again,” Kuchma went on. “They said that I already knew everything and if I didn’t agree they’d hang me in the disciplinary cell and say that I hung myself. The second time they convinced me that they’d kill me if I didn’t agree. I pretended to agree.”

Kuchma said the men, whose names he didn’t know, gave him a knife and that while they didn’t say directly to kill Khodorkovsky, “I understood that that’s what they meant. They said that they won’t add onto my sentence for it, that I’d live peacefully. That these were serious people from Moscow, that the government will defend me, very big people, that’s the sort of stuff they said.”

The ex-prisoner explained that he decided not to kill his cell mate, but just to slash him in the nose. “It was clear that there was more and more noise, that the bosses, lawyers, journalists had come running. I had hoped that those guys would leave me alone because of all this clamor,” he explained.

After attacking Khodorkovsky, Kuchma was put back in a disciplinary cell and the same plainclothes officers came back. “They beat me again and said: ‘what, you sleazeball, you didn’t do what we asked?!’ I apologized and said that I missed because I couldn’t see anything at night. They beat me some more.”

According to Gazeta.ru, representatives from the Federal Penitentiary Service refused to comment on Kuchma’s remarks. In addition, the editors have issued an open call for a criminal investigation.

Kuchma’s accusations come at a turbulent time in the Khodorkovsky case. The former oligarch’s extended prison term was upheld by a Moscow appeals court on Tuesday and he is now officially considered a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. Next week, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is set to rule on Khodorkovsky’s complaint against the Russian government about the legality of his arrest and conditions of his confinement.

Gazeta.ru’s full interview with Kuchma can be read in Russian here.

The human rights organization Amnesty International has declared jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his former business partner Platon Lebedev to be prisoners of conscience, Kasparov.ru reports.

The announcement came the same day as a Moscow City Court ruling to uphold a December 2010 verdict that extended the pair’s current prison sentences through 2017, reducing them slightly for a 2016 release. The case is recognized internationally as politically motivated, specifically at the behest of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

“For several years now these two men have been trapped in a judicial vortex that answers to political not legal considerations,” said a press release from Amnesty International on Tuesday. “Today’s verdict makes it clear that Russia’s lower courts are unable, or unwilling, to deliver justice in their cases.”

Just last week, the organization said that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev could not be considered prisoners of conscience, telling Radio Free Liberty/Radio Europe that “a prisoner of conscience is a person who was sentenced for his or her views or beliefs,” while “anyone who might be involved in wrongdoing or even crimes, but whose case was launched only for political reasons, can be called a political prisoner but not a prisoner of conscience.”

However, Tuesday’s statement indicates that the new verdict has definitively pushed Amnesty over the fence.

“The failure of the appeal court to address the fundamental flaws in the second trial and the fact that Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev have already spent eight years in jail on barely distinguishable charges, points to the conclusion that their second convictions have been sought for political reasons relating purely to who they are,” said Nicola Duckworth, director of Amnesty International’s Europe and Central Asia Program.

Vadim Klyuvgant, a lawyer for the prisoners, said that “this is a somewhat belated statement of a perfectly obvious fact – about seven years so.”

Harsh criticism of the upheld ruling has resounded throughout Europe and the United States. In a statement released on Tuesday, European Union Foreign Affairs Chief Catherine Ashton said she was “troubled by allegations of numerous violations in due process which reflect systemic problems within the Russian judiciary. The Khodorkovsky and Lebedev case has become emblematic for the lack of confidence in how the law is applied in Russia today.”

European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek was also appalled at the behavior of the Russian judicial system. “This case was marred with alleged violations of due process and fair trial from the very start. It shows unfortunately that there is still a very long path for Russia to take to improve its rule of law and protection of human rights,” he said.

Russia’s Public Chamber and Ministry of International Affairs both criticized Amnesty International’s about-face as “unexpected” and “one-sided and politicized,” respectively.

On Wednesday, the European Court of Human Rights announced that their own ruling on a complaint filed by Khodorkovsky would be issued on May 31. A press release on the court’s website outlined a list of the prisoner’s complaints against the Russian government:

Relying on Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment), Mr Khodorkovskiy complains in particular about the conditions in the remand prisons where he has been detained and in the courtroom during his trial. He also complains under Article 5 (right to liberty and security) about the unlawfulness of his arrest and subsequent detention pending investigation and trial, excessive length of the detention and unfairness of the detention proceedings. Lastly, he alleges that the criminal proceedings against him are politically motivated, in breach of Article 18 (limitation on use of restrictions on rights).

Svetlana Dobronravova, a reader of the Metro newspaper, told the publication she overheard lawyers discussing the verdict. “I was attending to my own matters in the Khamovnichesky Court,” said Dobronravova. “It was the last day of arguments in the Yukos case. I accidentally heard a female prosecutor’s telephone conversation. She said: ‘Now the lawyers are rattling off fees, Khodorkovsky is avoiding answering. But the sentence isn’t ready, they haven’t brought it from the Moscow City Court yet.'”

“I’m prepared to testify in court!” she added.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev were sentenced to 14 years in prison late last December in the second court case filed against them by the government. They were accused of stealing oil from their own company, Yukos. The case is widely believed to have been politically motivated and analysts and oppositionists alike routinely point to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as the driving force behind the guilty verdict.

On Monday, Khamovnichesky Court spokesperson and aide Natalya Vasilyeva said the verdict was not written by presiding Judge Viktor Danilkin, but by judges in the Moscow City Court.

According to Metro, Vasilyeva said her family is now experiencing pressure from Russian law enforcement – internal ministry officials have inquired about her spouse’s documents. The police denied any involvement.

Dobronravova is not the first person to come forward with evidence backing up Vasilyeva’s accusations. On Monday evening, Novaya Gazeta columnist Vera Chelishcheva wrote on the newspaper’s blog: “I agree with what Natasha is saying. We all heard how Danilkin screamed in his chamber during breaks in the hearings. He screamed at prosecutors, so it was occasionally heard in the courtroom.”

Danilkin himself has maintained that the accusations are slander, but, as Kasparov.ru put it, “is not rushing to bring her to court.”

Not only is Russia one of the most quantifiably corrupt countries in the world, but several high-profile businesses have come out with scathing criticism of it in recent years. Swedish businessman Lennart Dahlgren wrote an entire book, Despite Absurdity: How I Conquered Russia While It Conquered Me, on his nightmarish experience running Moscow’s first IKEA. William Browder of Hermitage Capital Management has been an outspoken critic of the country ever since one of his lawyers, Sergei Magnitsky, died in a Russian prison after discovering a corruption scheme involving government officials.

So it was only natural that Browder showed up to burst Russia’s bubble at Davos. As the Moscow Times reports:

William Browder, who once had about $4 billion invested in Russia through his Hermitage fund, spoiled on Thursday a Russian show in Davos meant to woo investors.

Browder said he had to flee Russia after accusing officials of corruption and saw some of his firms being stolen from him by Interior Ministry officials.

One of his lawyers, Sergei Magnitsky, died in jail in 2009 from what Browder says was torture.

The case has shaken investor confidence and drew criticism from Western organizations and governments. President Dmitry Medvedev ordered an investigation into the case and fired several officials, but Browder says the main culprits remain unpunished.

“The president of the country called for an investigation into the people who killed my lawyer,” Browder told a panel chaired by First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov and a hall packed with Western executives.

“One year after the investigation, people who killed the lawyer have been promoted higher by state orders. … My question to you, Igor, is what will prevent other investors to have the same experience after my experience in Russia,” he said at the discussion, titled “Russia’s Next Steps to Modernization.”

Shuvalov took more than five minutes to answer Browder’s questions, but his remarks seemed addressed more to the audience than to Browder himself.

“We know this case very well. … Twenty people were fired immediately. … It was not a case which was forgotten the next day,” he said in English.

“Unfortunately, I don’t know the results of the investigation and the end of the case. … The past is always very important, although not always positive, but we need to concentrate on the future,” he added.

“You have to acknowledge the country is changing for the better. If every year we can say that the rule of law is becoming better — not perfect but better — then I think I’m doing my job,” he added. “We need to work together.”

It was just as natural that officials would feel the need to justify the new guilty verdict of Russia’s most famous businessman, former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky:

President Dmitry Medvedev has compared jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky to the mastermind of the biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history in an apparent attempt to present the Yukos case as triumph of justice and highlight the ruling tandem’s unity.

“An investor, Russian or foreign, should observe the law, otherwise they can get a jail term like it happened with Khodorkovsky and Madoff,” Medvedev told Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison in 2009 for organizing a Ponzi scheme worth $18 billion. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin also compared him to Khodorkovsky during a televised call-in show in mid-December, shortly before a Moscow court added six years to Khodorkovsky’s previous sentence at a second trial.

Medvedev also said Wednesday that he did not wish to weigh in on the Khodorkovsky case because it would be an “interference with justice.”

He said he would not grant Khodorkovsky a presidential pardon — as supporters have sought — because it would mean that the Russian judicial system was so flawed that “you could ask the president to change the verdict.”

Given the wealth of worldwide criticism that Russia has received because of the Khodorkovsky verdict, it is doubtful that the president’s words will assuage any concerned businesses.

On Thursday, the institute released its Freedom in the World 2011 survey, which reports a serious decline in democracy worldwide.

“The world’s most powerful authoritarian regimes acted with increased brazenness in 2010,” says the survey. Among the most damaging acts of the year, Freedom House cited the trial and conviction of former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and China’s open disdain for the Nobel Peace Prize awards ceremony.

As the report notes, the Russian government’s charges against Khodorkovsky were widely dismissed as fraudulent. However, this did not prevent Prime Minister Vladimir Putin from publicly declaring “that Khodorkovsky belonged in jail even as the court was nearing a verdict.”

The report lambasts the Russian president for failing his entire pro-democracy agenda: “President Dmitry Medvedev’s highly publicized pledges to combat corruption, arrest those responsible for a series of high-profile murders of journalists and activists, and strengthen the rule of law have not been fulfilled. Instead, bribery and embezzlement remain the norm, politically motivated violence goes unpunished, and the law is enforced at the caprice of the leadership.”

Analysts said it was refreshing to learn that, behind closed doors, US diplomats in Russia and other authoritarian countries were “realistic, astute, concerned about growing repression, and often sympathetic toward the political opposition,” despite more positive statements that US officials make in public.

At the same time, they warned that strong, outspoken resistance on a global level was necessary to prevent authoritarian regimes from silencing their domestic critics. “Indeed,” says the report, “if the world’s democracies fail to unite and speak out in defense of their own values, despots will continue to gain from divide-and-conquer strategies, as Russia’s leaders are now doing in their approach to Europe and the United States.”

Freedom House ranks the level of each country’s political rights and civil liberties on a scale from 1 to 7, with 7 being the least free. For a self-proclaimed democracy, Russia’s scores are abysmal: 6 for political rights and 5 for civil liberties, putting it on the same level as the occupied West Bank, Rwanda and Yemen.

Read the full report here.

Vladimir Milov, former energy minister and prominent opposition figure: “Most likely, the sentence is going to be harsh, and I never had any different predictions than that. This is Vladimir Putin’s personal vendetta: he has a personal stake in this. When the Yukos case had only just begun, Putin saw it as a battle for power and Khodorkovsky as a competitor, a real political adversary. And Putin fears him: this is clear from how aggressively he talks about the process.”

Political analyst Dmitri Oreshkin: “It’s too bad for Judge Danilkin. It’s clear that both Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were prepared for the fact that they would be convicted. It’s clear that we don’t have independent courts and that there are no chances in the foreseeable future of becoming a state ruled by law. But there are rules to the game, rules called “arbitrariness.” Any sentence more than 8 years would be cruel, so therefore it won’t overlap the term that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev already served. Ten, 12, or 14 years – it’s not even important. What’s important is that it’s going to be imposed not by the courts or the law, but by the government.”

Igor Yakovenko, secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists: “The commentary is just as banal and predictable as the sentence. Everyone I talked to recently nevertheless had hope that Judge Danilkin would suddenly turn out to be a human being, oriented on the law and not on his own job-related considerations; they hoped for a miracle that Medvedev would turn out to be the president and not what he actually is. But there was no miracle – the country, obviously, will keep on sinking for an unknown period of time. The 2000s will keep going, and that’s sad.”

The Telegraph gives a full account of the story:

Judge Victor Danilkin said the former chief executive of oil company Yukos and Platon Lebedev, his business partner, had been found guilty of illegally obtaining some $25 billion (£16.3 billion) in oil revenues from the now defunct company.

“The court has found that Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev committed embezzlement acting in collusion with a group of people and using their professional positions,” Mr Danilkin told a courtroom full of media and defendants’ relatives.

Mr Khodorkovsky’s legal team immediately announced it would appeal. His lawyers attacked the judge for bowing to outside pressure. “We have no doubt that the court was pressured and the court did not make an independent decision,” Vadim Klyugvant, a lawyer for Mr Khodorkovsky, said.

Mr Khodorkovsky and Mr Lebedev appeared unmoved by the verdict. Mr Lebedev was seen reading a book and exchanging notes with his defence team, while Mr Khodorkovsky exchanged glances with his mother.

Police arrested 30 people outside the courtroom where supporters of Mr Khodorkovsky chanted “freedom” and “down with Putin”. Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister and former president, dismantled Yukos after Mr Khodorkovsky challenged powerful forces in Russia’s establishment.

The defence has maintained that the charges, which amount to stealing all the oil Yukos produced between 1998 and 2003, are absurd and politically motivated. The verdict seemed not to take account of testimony by key public figures including German Gref, the head of Russia’s biggest state owned bank, who said in court that the oil trading scheme at the heart of the case was legal. The judge, who read the verdict for eight hours before adjourning yesterday, also dismissed a green light from audits of Yukos by PricewaterhouseCoopers as based on incomplete and false information.

International reaction raised enduring concerns about Russia’s judicial system.

The [British] Foreign Office said the conviction could threaten trade relations between Britain and Russia. A Foreign Office spokesperson said the law should be applied in a “non-discriminatory and proportional way” in order to sustain an environment “in which investors can remain confident that they can do business, and that property and other rights are soundly protected”.

Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, said he was “very worried”. “The way the trial has been conducted is extremely dubious and a step backward on the road toward a modernisation of the country … It is in the interest of our Russian partners to take these concerns seriously and to stand up for the rule of law, democracy and human rights.”

Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, [s]aid the verdict would have a “negative impact on Russia’s reputation” and raised “serious questions about selective prosecution – and about the rule of law being overshadowed by political considerations”.

Reading the full verdict and sentencing is expected to take several days. Most observers expect Mr Khodorkovsky to be in prison at least until 2017, although if the judge shows leniency he could be out in three years.

Mr Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, is reaching the end of an eight-year sentence for tax evasion, which was widely viewed as punishment for funding opposition parties in defiance of Mr Putin.

After the first trial, Yukos was broken up and its assets snapped up at knock-down prices by state-owned oil companies.

Mr Putin has made his views of the former oligarch clear. In a television phone-in on December 16 he compared Mr Khodorkovsky with Bernard Madoff, the convicted US fraudster. Mr Putin also said that “thieves should sit behind bars”, even though the court had not delivered a verdict.

During the December 24 interview, the president made several key policy statements that contradicted Prime Minister Putin, who held his own four-hour televised question-and-answer session called “A Conversation with Vladimir Putin” a week ago.

The first controversial statement came in response to a question by NTV General Director Vladimir Kulistikov. Besides him, the general directors of Channel One and VGTRK, Konstantin Ernst and Oleg Dobrodeev, took part in the interview. “Might I ask you not about ZhKKh, but MBKh?” Kulistikov asked, using in turn the acronyms for housing and public utilities and jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. As the verdict in the second federal case against Khodorkovsky is due to be handed down on December 27, Medvedev was asked to speak on the prospects of the trial “as a lawyer and as a person.”

“As president I can say: neither the president nor any other person in state service has the right to express their position up to the moment the verdict is handed down,” Medvedev responded.

The last “other person” was Putin, who said during his own broadcast that Khodorkovsky was a robber who had been found guilty of fraud and theft by a court and “should sit in prison.” He stressed that this assessment stems from the fact that “Khodorkovsky’s crime was proven in court.” While Putin later specified that the remark was in reference to the first case and not the current one, this was only said to a small audience at the press conference after the broadcast.

Responding to the same question “as a lawyer,” Medvedev said that if anyone had evidence that the actions incriminating Khodorkovsky and co-defendant Platon Lebedev “have been committed by all businessmen,” then “bring it me – or the prosecutor general, more naturally – and we’ll work on it.”

The president declined to have his say on the Khodorkovsky case “as a person.”

Medvedev did express his opinion on a rather resonant issue that Putin had raised a week earlier. Speaking about “various prospective politicians” who, besides the prime minister and himself, he considers to be serious and well-known, Medvedev smiled and said: “I want to make an official announcement: such people exist. I say this without irony,” and here the president smiled even wider, “for example, the leaders of parliamentary factions.”

“And there’s Kasyanov, Nemtsov, Limonov, Kasparov,” Medvedev went on. “These are also public politicians. People have differing attitudes towards them, but they, too, are politicians.”

“But the main resource is a resource of talented people; that’s where our future presidents and prime ministers are,” the president summed up.

During his question and answer session, Putin spoke of the opposition with the utmost harshness. In response to one viewer’s question – “what do Nemtsov, Ryzhkov, Milov, and so on really want?” – Putin said that the opposition figures wanted “money and power.”

“In their time…in the ’90s, they, together with Berezovsky and the people in prison who we remembered today, nabbed not a few billions,” he said. “They were dragged away from the trough, they broke the bank, and now they want to come back to refill their pockets.” On December 23, the named oppositionists filed suit against Putin for defamation.

Medvedev had responded to a question about the opposition in his year-end interview in December 2009, with a less-than-complimentary view: “You know, the so-called extrasystemic opposition, it is extrasystemic because it does not see itself inside the political system,” he said at the time. “They, too, probably, reflect somebody’s preferences; it’s true that I sometimes have a hard time saying whose. But that’s already a question of inner value; I wouldn’t want to offend anybody.”

While Medvedev’s position today differs from both Putin’s and his own last year, the difference is primarily in political style, and there’s no talk of a split between the two leaders, says political analyst Dmitri Oreshkin.

In his own interview, Medvedev spoke “correctly” with the heads of the television channels, while Putin spoke to the people as a populist, Oreshkin explains. “Medvedev, in principal, has a different style; he is a different type of person; indeed, there were no salty questions, no catchphrases or cheap populism. That’s how it it’s been with them from the very beginning. Putin said that state corporations should be managed by civil servants, and Medvedev proposed employing independent managers. As a result, there are both.”

Meanwhile, the oppositionists themselves do not believe that the president’s new position will protect them from persecution. “If he had told the three television directors that the so-called ‘blacklists’ need to be liquidated and that these, as they called us, ‘public politicians’ need to be shown – then it would have been a positive signal,” said former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.

“Maybe he mixed something up or someone gave him the wrong list,” responded Eduard Limonov, leader of the National Bolshevik and Other Russia parties and a leader of the opposition’s primary protest campaign, Strategy 31. “I don’t see him as a prospective politician, he’s got no talent.”

United Civil Front leader Garry Kasparov argues that the president’s opposing view from Vladimir Putin on oppositionists indicates obvious disputes within the president and prime minister’s so-called tandem.

“The question of whether they [the disputes] are tactical or strategic remains open for now, because, regardless of all the significance of Medvedev’s statement, he still isn’t prepared to break away from Putin and ‘putinism,'” Kasparov asserted.

“If we recall Chubais’ recent statement that Medvedev will become president in 2012,” Kasparov continued, “one can presume that this part of the Russian elite would like to save something like ‘putinism’ with a human face; that is to say, return to 2002, when all non-democratic excesses and the corruption of Russian bureaucracy were not thrown in your face so obviously.”

Kasparov warns that only time will tell the true value of the president’s words. “For now, such statements by Medvedev have not turned into real actions, so we’ll wait for 2011,” he concluded.

Medvedev’s interview also touched on issues that he had brought up on his presidential blog on the eve of his yearly parliamentary address – the development of democracy, political parties, and stagnation. “Nobody cancels rallies and pickets,” he said in reference to efforts by police to break up a violent rally outside the Kremlin earlier this month. “But you need to obtain permission.”

The president linked political development to the responsibilities political parties should be taking – including United Russia, the party lead by Vladimir Putin that has a virtual political monopoly over the country. “United Russia should not just sit on the throne,” said Medvedev. “It should exude intelligence and strength. And corrupt [party members] should be pushed back and punished. Do not revel in your accomplishments. You cannot develop through stability alone; there needs to be drive, the intention to overcome yourself. Whoever thinks that everything with us is fine should stay behind in Courchevel.”

Responding to a question of whether it was difficult to find candidates for governor – a post directly appointed by the president in Russia since 2005 – Medvedev asked regional leaders not to linger in their posts for more than three terms. “Any governor must understand that they have two, at most three terms in order to change the lives of the people in their region,” he said. “You need to give way to the young and think more about what people think about you. If a governor has a so-called anti-rating, then he shouldn’t be reappointed.”

The interviewers were silent. “And there’s a pause,” joked the president. “Oh no,” the directors said, and relaxed, changing the questioning to Medvedev’s recent visit to the disputed Kuril Islands. “They’re tense,” the president joked, referring to the Japanese.

Then Medvedev himself decided to ask a question. “I’ll take this opportunity,” he said, and remarked that Russian television has been repeatedly criticized for “filtering information and not telling the truth.”

“While we have wonderful television, our news ticker is wretched,” Medvedev chided the directors.

Kulistikov was the first to respond. “I have always been free while working for the mass media,” he assured the president. Medvedev stared back with a look of disbelief. “There are editorial politics, and they can be discussed, but it is not a question of freedom,” Kulistikov added. According to Ernst, freedom on television is limited by the subjectivity of the people who make it. “But I understand the nature of the claim,” he stipulated.

“The level of freedom always corresponds to the times,” Dobrodeev said for his part. “Right now it is one of the highest levels of freedom in the entire history of television.”

This reasoning did not entirely satisfy the president. “In my view, you’re all right, and that’s your authorial position,” Medvedev said with a smile. “What shouldn’t exist, in my view, is the gap between the lists of important events that happen in life and the lists of events shown in the news. There may be varying assessments here.”

“The channels themselves should assign priorities – what’s more important, what’s less important. But the daily agenda, the list of news events should not have a dramatic break from the internet and other mass media. And in my view, that’s how it looks today,” Medvedev reprimanded the broadcasters. They frowned.

Medvedev did not mention Putin at any point during the broadcast. The president, who Russian citizens have overwhelmingly seen as a conduit for Putin’s policies since the very beginning of his time in office, is trending towards independence. However, this doesn’t indicate that everything has changed in a fundamental way, says Deputy Director Aleksei Grazhdankin of the Levada Analytical Center. When asked in November whether or not Medvedev promotes policies that are actually his own, Russian citizens responded in the following manner: 18% feel he follows Putin’s policies exactly, 53% say he is basically continuing Putin’s policies, 18% say he is gradually changing course, and 4% feel that the president is forwarding an entirely different set of policies. Figures from the same survey taken a year earlier show that opinions have changed slightly, if at all: the distribution of responses fell at 21%, 55%, 14%, and 3% respectively.

Adapted from an article by Gazeta.ru. Translation by theotherrussia.org.

As the BBC reports:

Former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky has told a court in Moscow that the fate of all Russians rests on the outcome of his trial for embezzlement.

He said no-one believed he would be acquitted of the latest charges, which could extend his jail term until 2017.

The former head of the Yukos oil company has already spent seven years in prison for tax evasion and is scheduled for release next year.

The judge has adjourned the case until he delivers a verdict on 15 December.

Khodorkovsky, 47, and his business partner Platon Lebedev stand accused of stealing more than two billion barrels of oil between 1998 and 2003, charges which the former tycoon has denounced as rubbish.

“It’s not me and Platon Lebedev who are now standing trial, it’s all the Russian people,” he told the court in his final address on Tuesday.

He sympathised with the judge, Viktor Danilkin, and said that millions of people were following the trial, hoping that Russia would become a country of freedom and law.

Khodorkovsky added that he did not wish to die in jail, but added: “If that is what is needed, I have no hesitation.”

Prosecutor Valery Lakhtin said on Monday that Khodorkovsky’s defence had been built on a lie, based on creating a public perception of a political element to the trial.

Many critics believe the government wants the former tycoon kept behind bars for as long as possible because he challenged former president Vladimir Putin by financing the opposition.

Now prime minister, Mr Putin, is thought likely to run for the presidency again in 2012.

Khodorkovsky has already spent time in prisons in eastern Siberia and in the capital.

But prosecutors have asked the judge for a long prison sentence.

Crowds of Khodorkovsky’s friends and relatives as well as observers and journalists have been battling to get inside a small courtroom in central Moscow to hear the closing stages of this latest trial.

Khodorkovsky’s closing speech can be read in its entirety in English here and in Russian here.