Khodarkovsky is one of the original seven Russian businessmen who gained their fortunes through the murky privatizations of the 1990's. Headed by Boris Berezovsky they include Mikhail Friedman, Vladimir Gusinsky, Vladimir Potanin, Alexander Smolensky and Vladimir Vinogradov.

The privatization process was the subject of "The Sale of the Century", the 2000 book by the former Financial Times Moscow Bureau Chief Chrystia Freeland which charted "Russia's Wild Ride From Communism to Capitalism".

Millions of Russians who suffered through the golden era of turbulent instability, repeated devaluations, coup attempts and shelling of the Russian parliament and  along the way saw their savings trashed while these seven built business empires using their wits, communist era connections, and influence to end up with the nation's wealth sold off for pennies in the pound. Upright mayors who publicly protested that the new businesses were not paying local taxes were murdered. Banks were shut leaving customers begging for their deposits. Customers who signed up for instalment plans to buy a Lada never received the cars.

Midway through the 1996 Presidential election campaign President Boris Yeltsin, standing for re-election had a heart attack. The seven tycoons, who were bankrolling Yeltsin's campaign, colluded with his campaign team to hide that fact from the electorate. When the voters went to the polls in the second round they did not know that Yeltsin was in intensive care recovering from a quintuple heart bypass. They could have been voting for a dead man.

That is the kind of clear, transparent standards that Mikhail Khodorkovsky practices and the kind of corruption and arbitrariness he inflicts on the public.

When Khodorkovsky and his partner PLaton Lebedev were jailed and sent to a remote Siberian jail not far from the border with China the vast majority of Russians were grimly satisfied that he was where he deserved to be. While the chattering classes bemoaned an assault on democracy and a rise in authoritarianism the ordinary working class Russians wanted to know why only Khodorkovsky of the seven found himself in jail? If the Kremlin had annulled all the 1990's privatizations, investigated all the murders of uncooperative local mayors and the manipulations that allowed these seven to amass their wealth then the ratings of then President Vladimir Putin would have gone through the roof.