Review: How to Slay a Dragon

I saw some publicity about this book before it was published, and I ordered it. The dragon in the title refers to Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, generally, and the author is Mikhail Khordorkovsky, who is a Russian oligarch who spent ten years in prison for criticising Putin. I decided it had to be a good read.

Mikhail Khordorkovsky

Khordorkovsky was born in Moscow in 1963 to a Jewish father and an Orthodox Christian mother, both his parents were engineers. He graduated with a degree in chemical engineering in 1986. As a young man, he was a fervent patriot, a committed communist and well introduced in the Soviet apparatus. In 1988 he founded a private bank and was a financial advisor to Boris Yeltsin. In the early 1990’s, he took advantage of runaway inflation to make a fortune in currency trading. In the mid 1990’s he bought 78% of the shares of Yukos, an oil conglomerate for 318 million dollars. (The shares were worth 5 billion dollars.) By 2003, the shares were worth $16 billion, and Khordorkovsky was the richest man in Russia. That same year, during a television appearance with Putin, he criticised the endemic corruption in Russia. He was then arrested for tax fraud and in 2005 he was sentenced to nine years in prison. Meanwhile, Yukos lost most of its value and was acquired by Rosneft, a state-owned company. In 2010, he was convicted of embezzlement and money laundering and his sentence was extended to 2017. Most independent observers, including Amnesty International, consider Khordorkovsky to be a prisoner of conscience.In prison he wrote of the need to “turn left” and adopt more liberal views in Russian governance, and he engaged in several hunger strikes for the benefit of fellow celebrity prisoners. In July 2014, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that the Russian government deliberately bankrupted Yukos to seize its assets and ordered it to reimburse Yukos shareholders a sum of approximately $50 billion. No such payments have been made. On 20 September 2014, Khodorkovsky officially relaunched the Open Russia movement , with a live teleconference broadcast with pro-democracy opposition and civil society activist groups in several Russian cities.  According to media reports around the time of the launch, Open Russia was intended to unite pro-European Russians in an attempt to challenge Putin’s grip on power. Khodorkovsky said the organization would promote independent media, political education, the rule of law, support for activists and journalists, free and fair elections and a program to reform Russia’s law enforcement and justice system. He has also said that the power should be shifted from Putin to parliament and the judiciary. He lives in London.

In How to Slay a Dragon, Khodorkovsky does not really address his ‘How to’ question except to suggest that it may happen from peaceful protest or uprising, what he calls a ‘revolution’. He is also vague about any role he might have in a future Russian government; he insists that he just wants to argue the case for a European style government in Russia. Nonetheless, it is clear that one doesn’t write a book as clear, comprehensive and as well argued at this one without having political ambitions. If it were up to me, I would put him in a high office. The strength of this book lies in the thoroughness of its coverage of the possibilities of government: empire vs nation state; superpower vs national interest; democracy vs autocracy; monopoly vs competition; how much freedom of speech; left or right inclination; justice vs mercy; parliamentary vs presidential republic. Khodorkovsky comes down on the liberal side of the available choices, and he is clear that Putin must go, Russia must change and victory should belong to Ukraine. The author makes these choices based on what is best for Russia, and he argues each case from the perspective of how the Russian culture is now, how it was historically, and how it should be for Russia’s and the world’s benefit. His knowledge of the details of Russian history is impressive. A very good read.