Russian Tycoon Reaches From Cell to Stir Up Debate on Political Elite

History is full of men who came to understand the error of their ways within the confines of a prison cell. To that number can perhaps be added Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oil tycoon who has resided in the Matrosskaya Tishina detention center for the last five months, awaiting trial on fraud and tax-evasion charges.

Khodorkovsky has stunned the Russian intelligentsia with the publication of a jailhouse manifesto, “The Crisis of Russian Liberalism,” that condemns his comrades in big business and liberal politics for pandering to the West and ignoring the widespread poverty in their homeland.

The former chief executive of Yukos Oil, who has been a major backer of pro-democracy parties and one of President Vladimir V. Putin’s biggest critics, says liberals have “accumulated too many Mercedeses, dachas, villas, nightclubs and gold credit cards” to realize how most Russians live.

The man who was famous for using his influence to kill tax increases in parliament called on big business to pay more taxes. Putin, accused by liberals of veering dangerously toward authoritarianism, “is more liberal and democratic than 70% of the population of our country,” his treatise asserts.

Whether the March 31 article in the daily Vedomosti constitutes repentance, wisdom, desperation or pragmatism -- or all of the above -- is anybody’s guess. In fact, some doubt that Khodorkovsky wrote it at all.

Yet many agree on the central arguments: that Russian liberals are out of step with the public, that big business “ignored the social aftermath” of the shady privatization schemes of the 1990s, that free-market advocates failed to mitigate the financial collapse that cost millions of Russians their life savings.

The dismal showing of liberals in two recent elections indicated that “the hour of atonement has come,” the manifesto says.

The article might have been seen as a simple change of heart had Khodorkovsky not immediately denied writing it. The Ministry of Justice produced a denial, signed by the billionaire. Authorities investigated, and afterward quoted Khodorkovsky as saying he was “in complete agreement” with what the article said.

Then came speculation that the real author was the oil magnate’s nemesis, political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky, whose warnings of a “creeping oligarchic coup” preceded the Kremlin’s crackdown on Yukos. But Belkovsky denied it and published what was practically a sonnet to the oligarch in the next day’s Vedomosti.

“This is the first time ideas like this are not aired by an ivory tower professional or outcast from the 1990s. They are being expressed by a classic Russian oligarch, a man who received huge assets and unprecedented influence from Boris Yeltsin’s hands,” Belkovsky wrote. “This is my chance to tell him the following: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, I underestimated you, because I did not know you. I beg your forgiveness.”

Just when things seemingly couldn’t get any stranger, someone noticed that a nearly identical manifesto had been published 10 days earlier on the website utro.ru, under the name “Stepanov.”

Who is Stepanov? No one knows.

“I can tell you that I personally have never met with someone who would claim that he was Stepanov.... I have only met with a person who is Stepanov’s representative,” said Mikhail Gurevich, editor of the website. He said the agent provided “potent arguments” that the document was credible and would have “far-reaching repercussions.”

Vedomosti, for its part, insisted that it was sure the March 31 manifesto was Khodorkovsky’s, but said it couldn’t say how it knew.

Yulia Latynina, a columnist for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, suggested that Kremlin operatives got wind of the oil tycoon’s impending bombshell, copied it without his knowledge and published the Stepanov version to “compromise” the final treatise when it appeared.

That the Kremlin’s fingerprints were all over the affair was doubted by few.

“The letter simply couldn’t have seen the light of day without the consent, without the support and even without a certain degree of pressure from the Kremlin,” said Lilia Shevtsova, senior analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Khodorkovsky lawyer Genrikh Padva said Friday that the manifesto was written by friends on the basis of his client’s letters from prison, and corrected and signed by him before publication.

“Khodorkovsky’s not just an extremely talented businessman, he’s a true intellectual. And his heart aches for this country,” Padva said. “He thought about all of these things, but he never had time to sit down and write his thoughts. Being confined in a prison cell, however, gives you some tragic advantages. History knows several cases where people displayed their most brilliant thoughts while in prison.”

The manifesto has caught fire in the public imagination, and now even big business is loath to argue with it. It was “a good letter, a smart one,” said Igor Yurgens of the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs.

“I would even call it a manifesto of a new Russian Mandela,” he said. “This doesn’t mean that Khodorkovsky is urging his colleagues to give away their riches, put on sackcloth and commit acts of self-flagellation with chains.

“But it is quite possible to at least discuss whether large private wealths should be taxed more. If this is the price for social peace, it’s better to pay it now than to have to deal with enraged people with pitchforks in their hands.”

Alexei V. Kuznetsov and Yakov Ryzhak of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.