Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky, sometimes known by his initials MBK, is an exiled Russian businessman, oligarch, and opposition activist, now residing in London. In 2003, Khodorkovsky was believed to be the wealthiest man in Russia, with a fortune estimated to be worth $15 billion, and was ranked 16th on Forbes list of billionaires. He had worked his way up the Komsomol apparatus, during the Soviet years, and started several businesses during the period of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in the mid-1990s, he accumulated considerable wealth by obtaining control of a number of Siberian oil fields unified under the name Yukos, one of the major companies to emerge from the privatization of state assets during the 1990s.
Khodorkovsky in 2023
Khodorkovsky with the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, on 20 December 2002
Khodorkovsky in 2001
Rally in support of political prisoners in Russia, Moscow on 27 October 2013
Russian oligarchs are business oligarchs of the former Soviet republics who rapidly accumulated wealth in the 1990s via the Russian privatisation that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The failing Soviet state left the ownership of state assets contested, which allowed for informal deals with former USSR officials as a means to acquire state property.
Putin (left), with Mikhail Khodorkovsky (right) in December 2002. Mikhail Khodorkovsky was jailed the following year.
Gennady Timchenko and Arkady Rotenberg in 2015
Putin (left) with Oleg Deripaska (right) in the Kremlin in March 2002
Putin (left), with Petr Fradkov (right) in the Kremlin in May 2019