RFE/RL interviews Pavel Khodorkovsky, the 24-year-old son of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, as he participated in against Russia’s holding of political prisoners on Times Square in New York City:
“I think that at the time my father was rather idealistic. He was innocent and he was confident he would be able to prove his innocence in court,” Pavel Khodorkovsky said. “But because neither the first nor the second trail was independent, he did not succeed. In retrospect, six years later, one can say that, yes, what he thought then was naïve. But at that time, he didn’t think so because there was a new president. There was a new wave of enthusiasm. People thought that these were changes for the better.”
Perhaps that’s what Mikhail Khodorkovsky meant when he told Ulitskaya that “a wise person most likely would have avoided such a fate.”
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I wouldn’t say naïve because there was a new President. It was already 2003, Putin was not new. There was already a precendent of cracking down on renegade oligarchs during his tenure (Gusinsky and Berezovsky). Your client, Bob, was simply too miopic to be an oligarch, per Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” theory.