Posted on April 16, 2011 - by Venik

Lyudmila Ulitskaya: why I’m not afraid of Vladimir Putin

Lyudmila Ulitskaya has shown she is not afraid to take on the Kremlin over jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky or the right to freedom of expression

Lyudmila Ulitskaya does not like to draw attention to herself. In person, she is unassuming and softly spoken, a 68-year-old grandmother with grey cropped hair and small, elegant hands. She does not consider herself exceptional. “I am one of those people who just enjoys living,” she says, shrugging her shoulders lightly as she takes her seat in the lobby of a draughty London hotel.

But this modest, self-effacing individual is one of Russia’s foremost contemporary novelists and a leading advocate for freedom of expression. She started writing almost by accident after she was sacked from her job as a geneticist in the 1960s and accused of dissident activity by the former Soviet authorities. “I thought, quite wrongly, that scientists were freer [than artists],” she has written in the past. “Of course, all these illusions were shattered over time.”

Her books and short stories have been translated into several languages – she is currently in the UK to promote the English language version of her novel Daniel Stein, Interpreter, which comes out in July. She was the first woman to win the Russian equivalent of the Booker prize and, more recently, has attracted both controversy and acclaim for publishing her correspondence with the jailed billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky. This week, she will be talking at the Foreign Policy Centre in London about personal and political freedom in Russia, examining what it is to be an artist in a state run by Vladimir Putin, a man not known for his tolerance of free speech or respect for human rights.

“I’m not afraid,” Ulitskaya insists, speaking through a translator. “Compared to the Stalinist era, our government now is a pussycat with soft paws … Having said that, I believe that Khodorkovsky is in jail because the whole society was so scared that no one stood up for his defence. There were threats: the court was afraid, the witnesses, the judge, because no one had the courage to speak up and that saddens me. That loss of dignity frustrates me because our society had only just started overcoming its fear after so many years of oppressive rule. The Russian people have once again started to be gripped by fear.”

Khodorkovsky, the former head of oil giant Yukos and once Russia’s richest man, was jailed for eight years in 2005 along with his business partner after being found guilty of embezzling more than £16.3bn worth of oil from his own company and laundering the proceeds. Khodorkovsky’s lawyers maintain that the charges are absurd and based on a failure to understand normal business practices. Their client, they argue, is a political prisoner and a symbol of a corrupt Russian judicial system – a view supported by Ulitskaya. “I’m absolutely convinced that all of the allegations were absurd,” she says. “It started from tax evasion, then got blown out of proportion. The next allegation was theft, which is completely absurd because you can’t steal from yourself.”

In December, the former businessman was convicted on new fraud charges, a move widely condemned in the west as politically motivated revenge for Khodorkovsky’s defiance of the Kremlin – in the past, the oligarch made no secret of his support for Putin’s liberal opponents. He now faces imprisonment until 2014.

Ulitskaya began writing to the imprisoned oligarch in 2008, addressing her letters to him in the Soviet-era labour camp in eastern Siberia where he was incarcerated. The correspondence lasted for a little under a year and their letters covered everything from personal backgrounds to political motivations. At first, Ulitskaya did not expect to find they had much in common. The child of two scientists, she had grown up in Moscow with an innate mistrust for authority after both her grandfathers were imprisoned by Stalin’s regime. By contrast, Khodorkovsky’s parents worked in a Soviet-era factory and, as a boy, he was a faithful member of the Komsomol, the youth wing of the Communist party. As an adult, he rose to become one of Boris Yeltsin’s most trusted advisers. But gradually, she learned to respect him.

“I was travelling round Russia a lot and I would constantly come across different traces of his charitable work,” Ulitskaya says. “He spent a lot of money on education, setting up children’s homes, giving schools the latest computer equipment. My support for Khodorkovsky primarily lies in how much money he spent on charitable enterprises.

“In Russia, there is a drastic gap between rich and poor, to the extent that I feel the country is on the brink of civil war. The salary of a civil servant can be hundreds of thousands less than that of a businessman. It causes huge irritation, especially when people show off their wealth, with all their furs and bling. I hope that the next generation will be educated more to spend their money wisely and charitably. And, for me, the first person to realise he should act like this was Khodorkovsky.”

In prison, she says, the businessman “has undergone enormous growth as a person and I really admire the way he has conducted himself during the last few years, despite the torment he and his family have been through. He is an outstanding individual.”

When the letters were published as a book two years ago, Ulitskaya’s Mikhail Khodorkovsky: Articles, Dialogues, Interviews became part of Russia’s extensive literature of exile. The prison camp – or gulag – has long occupied an important position in the Russian imagination for dissident writers, from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who believed imprisonment could be a transformative experience despite its basic inhumanity, to Varlam Shalamov, who felt that nothing civilised could come from incarceration. In his letters, Khodorkovsky admitted that he was “closer to Shalamov than Solzhenitsyn. Prison is a place of anti-culture and anti-civilisation. Good is evil and lies are the truth.”

But whatever personal redemption Khodorkovsky might have found, Ulitskaya admits that the realities are brutal. “Generally, anyone who comes out of a Russian prison is physically and emotionally mutilated,” she says. “A year-and-a-half ago, there were 900,000 prisoners in Russia and most were not there for a major crime but for financial reasons, yet their punishment is the same as if they’d murdered someone.”

Indeed, in an article for the Wall Street Journal in 2008, the foreign affairs columnist Bret Stephens suggested that Putin was increasingly using trumped-up charges of financial mismanagement to put political opponents or unwanted business competitors behind bars. Stephens observed that in Stalinist Russia one could get put in prison for no reason and that once again: “The line between ‘something’ and ‘nothing’ is becoming increasingly blurred.”

Given her outspoken nature, Ulitskaya could be forgiven for feeling uneasy in her homeland or fearing for her family – she lives in Moscow with her husband, an artist, and has two grown-up sons. But she insists she feels “completely free” and dismisses Putin as “a joke”.

“I’m not a huge fan in general of authority. In every society, government suppresses the individual element, one way or another.” She makes a squeezing gesture with her hands, as though wringing out a dishcloth. “That’s why I’m always on the side of a private individual.”

And what of her daily life in Russia? Does she ever feel that she has to compromise her artistic integrity to satisfy the state? She shakes her head. “Let’s be honest, presidents and leaders are not geniuses. If they were geniuses, they’d go into different spheres – not politics.

“My perception of Putin as an individual is that he is quite juvenile, not very mature, and all the pictures we have of him from state television are of Putin climbing Everest or fighting a tiger or extinguishing a fire. It’s just a kind of joke, these macho games.

“But if I want to judge Vladimir Putin as a politician, these are my criticisms: our country is in an atrocious condition. Schools and hospitals are underfunded, our pensioners are on the brink of poverty and the condition of our army is shocking. Our soldiers are underfed and live in unsanitary conditions.”

Ulitskaya is still in touch with Khodorkovsky, although she has never met him. She was at his trial in December, where he appeared in court in a cage made of bulletproof glass. “It was a very moving thing to see,” she says. “A very depressing sight. When I imagine just how much the whole trial has cost the Russian government, it frustrates me that the money has not been spent in a better, more constructive way.”

Yet she remains optimistic about the future – “I look at it with a huge amount of interest,” she says – and has been enjoying her stay in London “because of all the blossoming trees”.

Has she ever faced threats over her public support of Khodorkovsky, Russia’s most famous prisoner? “No,” she says, pushing back her chair and preparing to leave. And then she adds, eyes twinkling: “But if I do, I’ll let you know.”

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