Former Oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky Plans to Lead Political Movement

Russian Dissident Opens New Chapter in His Anti-Putin Movement

By PETER BAKER, NYT
OCT. 2, 2014

WASHINGTON — The last time he was here, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky was an oil tycoon and Russia’s richest man in the midst of a political fight with the Kremlin. He had been warned to leave his country and stay away. But when he was done with his business in Washington, he defiantly headed home.

Eleven years later, Mr. Khodorkovsky returned here this week for his first public visit since then, now Russia’s most famous political dissident after a decade in President Vladimir V. Putin’s prison camps. He was a little older, a little grayer but no less defiant as he vowed to lead a political movement to counter Putinism in Russia.

“Russia has been wasting time these past 10 years,” Mr. Khodorkovsky told an audience of American admirers at a dinner sponsored by the advocacy organization Freedom House on Wednesday night, in his first speech in the United States since being released from prison last year. “Now is when we must begin to make up this lost time.”

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