The London Review of Books has Keith Gessen’s article on the trials of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev.
He seemed to be moving in the direction Russia wanted to be moving: back into the club of advanced nations, rather than the club of basket-case states that lost wars to tiny mountain republics and periodically defaulted on their foreign debts. But somehow Khodorkovsky took it all too far, or too seriously. As Richard Sakwa describes in voluminous detail in his book on the Yukos affair, Khodorkovsky began trying to break the government monopoly on oil pipelines, planning an independent Yukos pipeline to China; and he also began negotiating a huge share swap, in essence a merger, with either ExxonMobil or ChevronTexaco. He began, in short, to believe his own press. ‘Khodorkovsky,’ one very sceptical American financier told me, ‘was the only one of the oligarchs who forgot that he was an oligarch, that is, a crook. He decided that because he’d stopped stealing from the company that he was a great businessman, a builder of value! The other oligarchs, when they saw the fuzz, knew they should run. But Khodorkovsky forgot.’