Calling Putin's bluff

Remember Mikhail Khodorkovsky? I thought not. He used to be the insanely rich head of Yukos, one of Russia's largest oil companies. Then he started making insanely threatening forays into politics; at least, they looked that way if you happened to be Vladimir Putin. As a result, Khodorkovsky has been insanely imprisoned for tax evasion and other trumped-up charges since October 2003. And just by coincidence, his former company got chopped up and sold off in parts, one of the more profitable of which just happens to have been acquired at an insanely low fire-sale price by a government-owned former competitor. Who would have thought?

Now, however, the AFP reports that Khodorkovsky, with a little help from his friends, is calling Putin's bluff. With the tax bill potentially paid off, what will happen to the government's case? In Russia, anything is possible, so we'll just have to see. But the result will certainly be enlightening as to what kind of game Putin's really playing here.

Incidentally, one should not necessarily be under the impression that Khodorkovsky is an all-around great guy, an innocent Putin victim. He's a member of a class of oligarchs who built personal empires, not to mention tremendous fortunes, by purchasing Soviet government assets during privatization in the 1990s. Were all of these transactions legit? Of course not. Were any of them on the up-and-up? As Katherine Hepburn's Queen Eleanor opines in The Lion in Winter, "in a world in which carpenters get resurrected, anything is possible." So has Khodorkovsky been involved in his fair share of shady dealings in the past decade? Probably. But that's not really the issue. If Putin were truly going after these robber barons, Moscow's prisons would be overflowing with white-collar criminals right now. All signs point to Khodorkovsky's erstwhile political ambitions as his real crime.