A reply may have come early on the morning of Oct. 25. That's when Khodorkovsky, 40, was arrested by armed Russian state security officials, who stormed his plane while it was refueling in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. Five days later, last Thursday, Russian prosecutors froze 44% of Yukos stock — worth some $13 billion. The world's fourth-largest oil company (and the source of much of Khodorkovsky's wealth, estimated last year at $8 billion) seemed in danger of being forcibly renationalized. After the arrest, the Moscow stock market, resurgent all year, tumbled 11% in one of its biggest one-day declines since the debt crisis of 1998. President Vladimir Putin — the man widely assumed to be behind the arrest — called for calm, backed the prosecution, and refused to meet with Russia's outraged billionaire oligarchs. The crisis even split Putin's inner circle: his Chief of Staff, Alexander Voloshin, resigned in fury over not being consulted on the arrest, and Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov defied Putin's order to stay out of the affair, saying he was "deeply concerned" about the freezing of Yukos shares.
Putin argues that nobody, however rich, is above the law. Khodorkovsky faces seven charges (see box), including embezzlement, theft and tax evasion, many of them dating back to the 1994 privatization of a fertilizer plant. He denies any wrongdoing; his many defenders say he's being prosecuted for doing what most of the ruling élite did in the 1990s — taking advantage of the bargain-basement sale of state assets. The real reason for his arrest, they say, is political. He's at the center of a titanic power struggle between "the Siloviki" (or hard men), as Putin's coterie of security officials and bureaucrats is known, and "the Family," the oligarchs and top officials who came to wealth and prominence during the wild days of privatization under former President Boris Yeltsin.
When Putin was elected President in 2000, those rival factions struck a deal: the businessmen in the Family, whose political wing included Voloshin and Kasyanov, were safe as long as they stayed out of politics. But when Khodorkovsky emerged as a force in his own right, he openly funded opposition parties and hinted at his own presidential ambitions. The Siloviki struck back by throwing him in jail, a move that some believe could herald the start of a much wider effort to turn back the clock on a decade of halting post-Soviet political and economic reforms. "Voloshin's resignation means that we now live in a different state," says Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the Center for Strategic Studies, an independent Moscow think tank. "This was the landmark between the end of the first Putin republic and the emergence of a second one, in which parliamentary and presidential elections are nothing but virtual reality."
That thesis will be tested soon: a parliamentary election is set for December and the presidential vote for March of next year. Khodorkovsky began giving financial support to the liberal Yabloko and Union of Right Forces parties early this year. He also publicly played up his intention to leave business when he's 45, just in time to prepare a campaign for the 2008 presidential election. Even the tour of Siberia he was making when he was arrested was seen as a way of drumming up support from Russia's regional élites. "Khodorkovsky was clearly looking to build major power in the Duma [the lower house of the Russian parliament] and run for the presidency," says Herman Pirchner, president of the American Foreign Policy Council.
By imprisoning Khodorkovsky, Putin hopes to neutralize him and silence the other oligarchs — but it's a risky move. He wants to wreck his rival but not the Russian economy. Yet the arrest could actually bolster Khodorkovsky's position, elevating him to the role of political martyr and giving the fractious opposition a figure around which to rally. "If we see that the President goes along only with the Siloviki," says Boris Nadezhdin, deputy chair of the Union of Right Forces faction in the Duma, "we must topple such a President or else leave the country." Determination like that, if it lasts, would put Putin in a bind. Khodorkovsky "is no timid rabbit," says Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch who left Russia in 2000 when investigations were launched into his business practices. "He has made Putin fear him. From now on, Putin will fear him even more."