Imagine: it’s 16 December 2004 and you are a middle-ranking banker living in Moscow – prosperous but ordinary, a long way below oligarch level. You are looking forward to a New Year’s trip with your family to Prague – the hotel is booked; your young son is excited. Your phone rings while you are at lunch: an investigator whom you’ve never heard of asks you to come and answer a few questions. You ask if tomorrow will do. ‘No, you must come today,’ insists the caller. ‘It’ll take around 20 minutes.’ What do you do?
If this were the beginning of a thriller, Vladimir Pereverzin would have instantly made his way to the secret lock-up with the false identity documents and gone on the run. As it was just an ordinary day in a so far ordinary life, however, he trotted over to meet the investigator at the ministry for internal affairs. And so began an incomprehensible, hallucinatory, seven-year nightmare. Arrested, searched, threatened by a drunk cop and told to confess, Pereverzin still couldn’t understand what it was he was being accused of. Finally his interrogator came clean. ‘We’re not interested in you. Give us a statement against Brudno, Lebedev and Khodorkovsky, and you can go home and live your life.’
From 1998-2002 Pereverzin had worked for Yukos, the oil company owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of the richest men in Russia and the only oligarch to campaign for free speech and pluralism. In 2003 Khodorkovsky was arrested, tried and given a nine-year sentence – a ‘Kafkaesque procedure’, as Masha Gessen called it.
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