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Exposed: the ugly face of Putin’s Russia

Progress Online

In a powerful documentary on Putin’s Russia made by Norma Percy to be shown on BBC2 on 19 January there is an extraordinary moment when the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky confronts the recently elected President Putin. On film he tells him that Russia is so corrupt up that to 10 per cent of national wealth is disappearing into the hands of the post-Soviet bureaucracy. So much so that all the best and brightest graduates leaving college want to be tax police. That’s where the money is to be made, complains the owner of Yukos, as tax shakedowns were the most common form of getting rich quick.

At the time, in 2002, the sleek, jowly Khodorkovsky was still Russia’s top oligarch. As he confronts Putin the Russian leader’s eyes narrow and he taps his pencil with irritation on the table as he rebukes the oligarch at a business leaders’ council held in the Kremlin which was filmed and remains an electrifying moment in the documentary. Stalin also used a pencil rather than a pen to initial or tick lists to be sent to the Gulag. Khodorkovsky today finds himself in prison where those business leaders who did not pay their dues to the Putinocracy have found themselves if they did not flee to exile in time.