For 2003, Expert couldn’t choose just one man of the year. We chose two: Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Roman Abramovich. These two men, this very duo have had a major impact on the fate of capitalism in Russia.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been the model big Russian capitalist for many years now. Although his background was not in oil, he has managed to build the most efficient oil company in Russia and to exasperate old-school oil tycoons. He is an outstanding organizer who gathered the world’s best specialists in oil production at YUKOS. He is also excellent at PR. Over the last two years, he has succeeded in getting YUKOS globally recognized as an open and modern oil company, which has contributed considerably to increasing its capitalization.
Khodorkovsky once said that nothing was more interesting than managing big capital. Nonetheless at some point, he got bored and apparently thought that it would be easy to convert economic into political power and build a truly democratic Russia, a civil society spanning the country with the parliament at its head. Thus, Russia would be saved from the threat of totalitarianism.
He acted in politics as aggressively, or one could even say as brazenly, as he once had in business. It turned out, however, that politics is a subtler affair than business, and the state is a rival far stronger than his former competitors in the struggle for assets.
He could have gone abroad but he instead stayed, perhaps, in hope of continuing the fight. Could he win today? With all due respect, the answer is no. By fighting for democracy, Khodorkovsky played politics following the rules of “directed democracy” popular nowadays. He never publicly voiced his political views, nor did he look for supporters – only for collaborators. This method turned out to be inefficient. “Mr. Khodorkovsky is an excellent businessman but a very poor politician,” as some in the Western media have written in recent months.

However, the crisis surrounding the YUKOS Affair has a strongly positive side, like any crisis. At some point, business and the state found themselves openly on different sides of the barricades. It then became clear that when getting involved in politics, business must explicitly and openly state its views and goals.
Roman Abramovich – “the orphan boy,” “the family treasurer” and “an absolute business genius” according to Boris Berezovsky’s early interpretation, – turned out calmer and wiser. Perhaps, the difference is in age. Today’s thirty-somethings are not going to act like dissidents. The borders of capital power are rigidly outlined in Russia today and not by the president’s will alone. Abramovich could have seen this in the case of Chukotka. After spending quite a lot of money to alleviate the hardship of his province’s inhabitants, he won neither love nor forgiveness for the “era of Russian plunder,” the privatization of the 1990s. The public, having wasted significant efforts in search of oil and gold deposits in the cold Chukchi soil, simply shrugged their shoulders and said, “The oligarch is amusing himself in Chukotka.” If Abramovich had been in one of the Central Russian provinces, they would have yelled, “That Jew wormed his way into the heart of Russia!”
Abramovich didn’t begin to contemplate why he is treated like a stranger in a strange land. He sold part of his Russian assets and went to England to purchase Chelsea. They say London-based financiers are delighted with the way he pulled off the deal. The Western press writes that Abramovich possesses the largest cash supply in the world today. These remarks reveal their respect.
Abramovich has divided Russians into two camps: those who consider Chelsea their own, i.e. a Russian club now; and those who are unhappy because while Russia suffers, its tycoons are buying UK football clubs.
The era of oligarchs finally came to an end this year. Today, many people are saying that we shouldn’t give up our history, meaning the Soviet era. We shouldn’t give up our post-Soviet history, either. Slogans like “fair privatization” or “unfair privatization” are irrelevant. Privatization is a done deal and should be accepted unconditionally.
“Before we come together, we must break apart,” a certain great politician wrote. We hoped to avoid the open declaration of our views and the active power struggle between various ideas. We thought that the state would arrange everything for the best on its own. Khodorkovsky and Abramovich have demonstrated by their example that this will not work and that freedom comes to those who assume responsibility. The conflicts they triggered have caused us to start talking about establishing a responsible right party. Its first task would be to combine the idea of inviolate private ownership with Russian national interests.

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