RUSSIA: Determination and lack of compromise made him one of the country's richest men but also landed him in jail, write Neil Buckley, Isabel Gorst and Arkady Ostrovsky
Mikhail Khodorkovsky always knew what he wanted to do. By his own account, children in his 1960s Moscow kindergarten nicknamed him "director", a reference to his dreams of running a Soviet factory.
In the end Khodorkovsky's ambition, ruthlessness and guile drove him to become Russia's richest man, the creator of its most successful oil business. But, as he started to clash with the Russian government, that same wilful determination and refusal to compromise ultimately landed him behind bars.
By taking his activities beyond business and into politics, he became a threat to state power, though his supporters and detractors portray the nature of this threat quite differently.
By the age of 23, Khodorkovsky's organisational abilities had already taken him to deputy head of the Komsomol, or young communist league, committee at the Moscow institute where he studied.
By then, however, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had begun to encourage co-operatives, or quasi-private businesses, and so Khodorkovsky set off on the path to become far more than a "red director".
He branched out into business, starting an unsuccessful youth cafe. Then he began a business channelling scientific research from Russia's universities to factories. In so doing he figured out a way to exploit an arcane financial loophole, turning "non-cash" or accounting roubles that state enterprises had on their books into real money.
That business became the foundation for Menatep, a bank that continued to make money exploiting the loopholes created by the incomplete liberalisation of Russia's economy in the 1990s.
Khodorkovsky used the capital he had amassed to take part in Russia's mass privatisation programme, buying everything he could lay his hands on - from food-processing plants to textile mills to a titanium-magnesium plant.
By 1995 he was wealthy enough to take part in the scheme that would multiply his millions of dollars into billions and turn him into one of Russia's "oligarchs". This was the Faustian pact known as loans for shares.
A small group of prospering businessmen lent money to the almost-bankrupt Russian government and funded President Boris Yeltsin's re-election campaign to thwart the expected victory of his communist rival, Gennady Zyuganov.
As collateral, they were given custody of shares in some of Russia's most lucrative businesses, held back from a first round of privatisation.
When the loans were not repaid - and there was little expectation they would be - the businessmen had the right to sell the shares, but in many case they bought them, at steep discounts.
Khodorkovsky's prize was a 78 per cent stake in Yukos, an oil holding company, bought for $309 million. He went on to use ruthless methods to squeeze out minority shareholders, including massive new share issues that diluted the small shareholders, including Kenneth Dart, the US financier, in the Yukos subsidiaries that controlled its oilfields.
Having consolidated control, however, by 2000 Khodorkovsky changed direction. William Browder, who runs Russia's largest public equity fund, Hermitage Capital, believes Khodorkovsky was heavily influenced by the newly elected President Vladimir Putin's famous bargain with the oligarchs.
Putin told Russia's richest businessmen they could keep the empires they had built in the 1990s provided they stayed out of politics, ended corrupt practices such as bribing officials, and paid their taxes.
"Khodorkovsky had behaved like a temporary owner throughout the 1990s, because he didn't know how long he would be the owner," says Browder. Putin's promise held out the prospect of real long-term ownership, rather than "renting" his businesses.
Khodorkovsky set about turning Yukos into a well-run, transparent company, bringing in management and public relations consultants, western auditors and oil technology companies to help pump more oil. His reward was a massive increase in Yukos's market value to a peak of $35 billion, giving Khodorkovsky a personal worth of $15 billion.
Aping the 19th-century American robber-barons, the Yukos chief turned himself into a philanthropist. He founded the Open Russia Foundation, modelled on George Soros's Open Society organisation, to support civic society in Russia.
He also funded New Civilisation, a summer camp organisation teaching young people about the "rule of law and open markets", and internet education for schoolchildren. He cultivated US contacts and made a $1 million donation to the US Library of Congress.
But his philanthropy gradually turned more political. Yukos gave millions of dollars to Yabloko, the Russian liberal opposition party, and more modest support to another liberal party, the Union of Right Forces, and the Communist Party.
Critics, including senior Russian government officials, say his political activities went further, including paying members of the Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, to vote against legislation, notably increases in oil taxation, that Yukos opposed.
One senior official says Khodorkovsky was creating a "whole alternative power structure". A former official, who asked not to be named, confirmed that the Yukos chief's activities were restricting the government's ability to carry out reforms.
German Gref, Russia's reformist economy minister, told Germany's Die Zeit last year that Khodorkovsky once told him, referring to a new oil tax law, "you either withdraw this law or we will have you fired".
Even Putin, who insists the Yukos case is a matter for the tax authorities and prosecutors, has hinted at Khodorkovsky's political activities.
"People who in five to six years earned a personal fortune of $5 billion, $6 billion, $7 billion are in a position to spend a few million to defend their interests," he told Israeli television last month.
The oil magnate was becoming a challenger to the state in other ways. The September 11th terrorist attacks on the US accelerated attempts to find alternative sources of oil beyond the Middle East.
US president George Bush and Putin signed an energy dialogue accord in 2001 intended to spur US investment in oil projects to boost Russia's role as a global supplier.
Khodorkovsky heavy-handedly tried to ensure that Yukos was the main beneficiary of the accord.
He came up with plans to build pipelines from east Siberia to China, and - with US encouragement - to Russia's north-west coast to open up the transatlantic oil trade. This was a direct challenge to the Russian government's long-standing policy of keeping a grip on privately owned oil companies through its 100 per cent ownership of oil pipelines.
He opened talks about the possible sale of a strategic stake in Yukos to Exxon-Mobil and Chevron Texaco of the US.
Khodorkovsky's defenders say he was just a businessman following a strategy and that his political activities would be seen as legitimate lobbying in western countries. Sanford Saunders, a lawyer at Greenberg Traurig, representing the Yukos chief, says he simply became too much of an independent force.
"This was going to be the first time possibly in the history of this country when you had an independent, free-thinking, free-speaking businessman who was going to function outside the restrictions of the state."
But why did Khodorkovsky refuse to tone down the activism that drew the Kremlin's ire, even after his business partner, Platon Lebedev, was arrested in a clear warning to him in July 2003.
People who know him say the Yukos chief's pride in the success of his business nurtured a sense of mission to "save" Russia. The sycophancy of people around him encouraged him to think he was "on a train to heaven", says one former US manager. Some time in late 2002, he stopped listening to the warnings.
Days after Lebedev's arrest, Khodorkovsky travelled to a business conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, attended by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Many thought he would not return to Russia - but he did.
One Russian oligarch who knows him well says Khodorkovsky may have miscalculated, believing his high-level contacts in Washington and US business would raise a storm if he were arrested. The irony, this businessman adds, is that Khodorkovsky "did not think badly of Putin".
"But he had his position on certain issues and he was not going to change it. This is why he went back to Russia. He knew he could be arrested, but he had already made up his mind. It was like a mission. Like a real oligarch, he always made completely independent decisions. The oligarchs never asked anyone's advice."