RUTHFULLY YOURS

Russia’s most famous dissident today, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is neither artist nor philosopher. He spent much of the 1990s as a Kremlin favorite and was Russia’s richest man as head of Yukos, the country’s largest private oil company. Today, he is en route to an undisclosed prison somewhere in Siberia.

The Moscow native began funding liberal opposition groups and independent media in the late 1990s. That political dabbling, plus the pursuit of Western oil deals, quickly landed him on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bad side. During one televised meeting in February 2003, Mr. Khodorkovsky complained of unfair advantages conferred to Rosneft, which is 75% owned by the Russian government. Eight months later Mr. Khodorkovsky was arrested on charges of tax evasion and fraud, and he has been in prison ever since. Yukos’s assets were transferred to Rosneft in 2007.

Officially, Mr. Khodorkovsky is due for release in 2016. In reality, “it seems pretty obvious to me that my release doesn’t depend on me,” he said on Friday, dictating his responses to my and other journalists’ questions through his lawyer shortly before being dispatched to Siberia.

Last December, with Mr. Khodorkovsky’s eight-year term coming to an end and Russia’s 2012 elections in sight, he was convicted afresh, this time for somehow absconding with 218 million tons of Yukos’s oil and laundering the profits. Moscow last week announced an investigation into the conduct of that second trial. The Russian press reports that the probe will be led by the same investigator who helped prosecute the trial in question. Mr. Khodorkovsky’s defense team said in January that they don’t rule out still more charges against their client, and the prosecution has boasted previously of its “bottomless” case file on Mr. Khodorkovsky.

Hence his view that Mr. Putin “shares with Stalin a vision of the role of the judiciary. . . . And still, he is not the only one like this in Russia. There is a whole group of people who have become billionaires and multimillionaires on the rout of Yukos who are impeding my release. And who are going to impede it, irrespective of the degree of Vladimir Putin’s personal involvement in the process.”

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Zina Saunders

What about the prospect of a challenge to Mr. Putin, now Russia’s prime minister, by current President Dmitry Medvedev, who was elected in 2008 on the promise of restoring investor confidence in Russia? “All I can say is that the situation regarding rule of law in Russia has not improved since Dmitry Medvedev became President,” Mr. Khodorkovsky says. “Did he try? I would say ‘yes.’ Did he succeed? The answer must be ‘no.'”

That doesn’t appear to have discouraged Western leaders’ recent rapprochement with Moscow, which Mr. Khodorkovsky points out only helps Mr. Putin and his allies justify their actions at home. “The biggest misconception of some people in the West is that they believe ‘realpolitik’ in relations with Russia means not standing up for Euro-Atlantic values of democracy, property rights and rule of law.”

The same goes for Russia’s seat at the Group of Eight, he says, despite there being “no such thing as free elections, freedom of expression or rule of law in Russia today. As a result, the Russian leadership is getting an entry card into the club without any duties and responsibilities.” Mr. Khodorkovsky does defend Russia’s bid to enter the World Trade Organization, arguing that “the Russian people should not be punished for their corrupt and law-breaking officials.”

Whether the Russian people share that concern for Mr. Khodorkovsky is another question. His press coverage at home largely toes Mr. Putin’s line. In April, the independent Levada polling center reported that 56% of respondents said they had “heard nothing about the case,” up from 6% in 2005. Still, Mr. Khodorkovsky predicts that his countrymen’s relative docility can’t last forever: “The main task for my country is to not miss the historic ‘window of opportunity’ for an orderly liberalization. . . . If a truly democratic tradition for the resolution of the question of power does not exist by that time, no siloviki [strongmen] will be able to help keep the country under control.”

Maybe not. But has Mr. Khodorkovsky ever considered that he personally might gain freedom more quickly if he’d stop giving interviews? “In 2006, when it became known that a second case against me was being prepared, I realized that perhaps I would have to spend the rest of my life in jail. In the first years of the re-creation of Russia, like many of our friends, we fought for the democratization of the country, although we made many mistakes. . . . Maybe I didn’t realize soon enough that money is not interesting in and of itself.”

But jail, he says, only “changed the means, not the goal. The situation is such that my line of behavior in prison no longer carries potential threats for my friends, family, and colleagues. For myself I am not afraid. And life without a goal—is not life.”

Miss Jolis is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe. This interview was written from responses that Mr. Khodorkovsky sent to The Journal, France’s Le Figaro, Italy’s Il Mondo and Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The full transcript is available at www.opinionjournal.com.