“It wouldn’t be interesting for me to be President of the country when the country is developing normally,” Khodorkovsky said. Andrei Sakharov would never have spoken of taking up residence in the Kremlin. Still, as he took questions onstage from a journalist from Le Monde, he displayed none of the modesty of his forebears in dissent. He was dressed casually, as always, in jeans and a sweater, and spoke in a quiet, well-mannered voice. He is fifty-one now he’s become stockier since his release, and his graying hair has grown out of the prison buzz cut. One warm, drizzly evening this past September, Khodorkovsky was in Paris, speaking to an audience at the Opéra, on the Place de la Bastille. He will tell anyone who asks that, after a decade in various prison camps, he would not mind displacing the man who sent him there-Vladimir Putin. Since that day of release and exile, Khodorkovsky has been living outside Zurich and travelling to capitals throughout the West, making speeches, accepting awards, and hinting broadly at a return to Russia. Petersburg there they handed him a parka and a passport and put him on a flight to Berlin. It has been a year since the guards at a prison camp just below the Arctic Circle told Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon and once the richest man in Russia, to pack his things. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon who got rich in the post-Soviet legal vacuum, makes an unlikely democracy activist.
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