Mikhail Khodorkovsky (26 June 1963-) was a Russian business oligarch and Deputy Minister of Energy in 1993. Once the powerful owner of the Yukos oil fields in Siberia, Khodorkovsky became a philanthropist in Switzerland and a human rights activist after he was jailed by political opponent Vladimir Putin from 2003 to 2013.
Biography[]
A young Khodorkovsky at school
Mikhail Khodorkovsky was born in Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union on 26 June 1963 to a Russian Jewish father and an Orthodox Christian mother, and he became deputy head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Komsomol youth program at the D. Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia before graduating in 1986; he attended Mendeleev due to Moscow State University's refusal to admit students with Jewish names. After graduation, he began to work full-time for Komsomol, and he opened a private café during Perestroika, his first business venture. He later used his connections in politics to help in developing a free market, and he helped with the founding of the Menatep bank.
Rise to power[]
Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky during the 1990s
In 1991, Khodorkovsky was one of the men who stood on the barricades in front of the Russian White House to protect Boris Yeltsin during the 1991 Soviet coup attempt, and he became Deputy Minister of Energy of Russia in 1993, as well as serving as one of Yeltsin's senior advisors. Khodorkovsky became very wealthy after unifying several Siberian oil fields under his Yukos oil company, and he kept his company afloat after the 1998 economic crisis by taking his shares offshore to protect Yukos from creditors. In October 2003, he was arrested and charged with fraud, and he was sentenced to nine years in prison by President Vladimir Putin in May 2005 in a politically-charged trial. He was found guilty of embezzlement and money laundering as well as fraud, leading to his sentence being extended. The European Court of Human Rights ordered for Russia to redress the issue, as Khodorkovsky had been tried without due process. Amnesty International considered him to be a prisoner of conscience during his imprisonment, and several other countries argued against his imprisonment. At the end of 2013, Khodorkovsky was pardoned and released from prison, and he immediately left Russia for Switzerland with his fortune of $500,000,000. Khodorkovsky would become the leading exiled critic of the Kremlin after Boris Berezovsky's death, founding the Open Russia organization in 2014.