MOSCOW/BERLIN, (Reuters) – Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian oil tycoon jailed for a decade after posing a challenge to Vladimir Putin, was freed by a presidential pardon on Friday and immediately flew to Berlin where he hoped to be reunited with his family.
Once Russia’s richest man, the 50-year-old looked pale and thin but happy in a photograph of him being greeted by German well-wishers on the tarmac after landing on a private jet.
President Putin, who surprised Russians and gave a brief lift to the stock market by announcing Khodorkovsky’s pardon on Thursday, said he was acting out of “principles of humanity” because Khodorkovsky’s mother is ill.
A Russian government source said freeing his best-known and potentially most powerful critic could deflect international complaints about Putin’s human rights record as Russia prepares to host the Winter Olympics at Sochi in seven weeks’ time.
It also appeared to show that Putin is feeling confident in his control of the country after facing down street protests when he was re-elected last year. Within hours of being released from Penal Colony No. 7 at Segezha, deep in the sub-Arctic forest near the Finnish border, Khodorkovsky was in the German capital and issued a statement confirming he had sought a pardon and had not admitted guilt.
“I appealed to the Russian president on Nov. 12 with a request for a pardon in connection with family circumstances,” he said. “The issue of an admission of guilt was not raised.”
Putin’s spokesman said the Russian president had received two letters from Khodorkovsky – a long personal letter and the official pardon request. The pardon was granted unconditionally and Khodorkovsky was free to return to Russia, he said.
The former oil baron had been due to be released next August but supporters feared the sentence could be extended, as it was before. He spent the last few years working at the jail, in an area once part of Stalin’s Gulag labour camp system.
With a note of defiance, Khodorkvsky thanked wellwishers for their support “to me, my family and all those who were unjustly convicted and continue to be persecuted”.
In flying to Germany and possibly into exile on a hastily issued passport, Khodorkovsky was following a route taken by Soviet-era dissidents like “Gulag Archipelago” author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was expelled to West Germany 40 years ago.
