Strongman, The

these problems arise in the first place?’
    And Putin ended with a clear threat. ‘So I am passing the buck back to you,’ he said. It meant: you talk to me about my people being corrupt, and my people will start looking at your corruption.
    Kasyanov, who was sitting next to the president, says the oligarchs around the table ‘nearly climbed under the table in fear’. Was Putin reopening the whole issue of how Russia’s strategic industries were privatised in the 1990s?
    Kasyanov says he went to see Putin in his office afterwards. ‘Naively, I thought the president didn’t know the details of the Rosneft deal. I said, “You shouldn’t have reacted so sharply. Khodorkovsky’s right.” ’ But Putin shot back, insisting that it was Rosneft’s right as a state company to increase its assets and there was nothing wrong with the deal. Kasyanov was taken aback: ‘He started citing various figures that even I, the prime minister, didn’t know. He knew more about the affair than I did.’ 14
    To try to pre-empt the reprisals at which Putin had hinted, Khodorkovsky came to Kasyanov two weeks later with a plan. Speaking, he said, on behalf of his fellow oligarchs, he proposed a new law, under which the tycoons who had bought up state enterprises on the cheap in the 1990s – businesses that were now worth billions of dollars – should pay compensation to the state, a sort of one-off tax to cover the massive increase in their worth. The windfall would go into a special fund to finance ‘important reforms’. Kasyanov liked the idea, which could have given the government an extra $15–20 billion to spend on new highways, high-speed rail links, power lines, airports and the like. He asked Khodorkovsky to draw up a draft law, which he did within a week. Kasyanov presented it to President Putin. And that was the last that was heard of it. 15 Putin was already thinking of other ways to make Khodorkovsky pay.
    Leonid Nevzlin remembers receiving disturbing news from a contact in Russia’s intelligence service. ‘I was given information that there was a special group answerable only to the FSB chief Patrushev and his deputy Zaostrovstsev, whose job was to build a criminal case against Yukos and watch its managers and shareholders.’
    In the early summer a think-tank known as the National Strategy Council published an analytical report entitled ‘The State and Oligarchy’, written by an influential thinker, Stanislav Belkovsky, who was regarded as close to the siloviki . He argued that the oligarchs were preparing nothing less than a creeping putsch, which would bring the Duma under their control, leading to the rewriting of the constitution and the crowning of Khodorkovsky as all-powerful prime minister, with the presidency emasculated.
    At Putin’s annual press conference a few days later, a reporter was primed to ask a question about the Belkovsky report, and the president was ready with a chilling reminder of how he dealt with his political enemies: ‘I am absolutely sure that the appropriate separation of business and power has been established ... Those who disagree with this policy, as the saying goes, either no longer exist, or have been sent far away.’
    Putin had many reasons to fear or resent Khodorkovsky. For two and a half years he had defied the president’s instruction to the oligarchs to keep out of politics. But even Khodorkovsky’s purely business activities challenged the siloviki . They regarded the country’s natural resources, particularly oil and gas, as vital strategic assets, not to be entrusted to private individuals – and certainly not to foreign states. Khodorkovsky had the opposite view: the private sector could run things more efficiently, and if foreign participation helped, so much the better.
    In April 2003 Yukos (now Russia’s largest oil producer) agreed to merge with Roman Abramovich’s Sibneft to form what would be the world’s fourth biggest oil company, worth $35 billion. (It was this deal that allowed Abramovich to buy Chelsea football club.) Khodorkovsky then took a further step towards disaster – by starting talks with both ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil about selling one of them a major stake in the Russian company. The prime minister Kasyanov gave his approval for the deal. But the siloviki were incensed.
    Through the summer of 2003 events moved fast. In June Yukos’s security chief, Alexei Pichugin, was arrested and accused of murder. The following month