You used to be Russia’s richest man, but then you fell out with then-president Vladimir Putin. Big mistake. Now you spend your days and months stuck in a stuffy courtroom. Such is the unhappy lot of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the one-time billionaire oligarch whom the Kremlin sent to Siberia, then brought back for another vindictive show trial.
But Khodorkovsky’s supporters have come up with a novel way to cheer him up: They have sent in the artists. Since June, dozens have sat in on sessions at the court, sketching the former tycoon and his co-defendant, Platon Lebedev. With its irascible judge, troll-like guards and dim-witted prosecutor, the case has everything you could wish for, caricature-wise. There’s even a cage. Khodorkovsky and Lebedev sit in it.
Last week, it was the turn of Moscow-based British artist Davina Garrido De Miguel to draw the court.
“It’s been difficult to capture him,” she said. “He looks bleached, a bit like Nosferatu — it’s like watching a ghost. I found myself being drawn to his lawyer’s expensive shoes.”
At the end of each session, the artists show their work to the two defendants. Khodorkovsky gave a grinning thumbs-up to Garrido’s caricature of the judge, but a “Do I really look that awful?” shrug to her charcoal portrait of him. (To be fair, she had scribbled “looks ill” and “pallor green” on it.)
The fact Khodorkovsky doesn’t look great is not surprising, given that he’s been on trial for six months already.
Khordorkovsky got an eight-year term the last time and recently told a German magazine he expected to die in prison. It was Stalin’s Soviet Union, of course, that perfected the genre of the show trial. These days, things are settled by a discreet phone call from the Kremlin.
The sketches are on display in Moscow’s Central House of Artists.
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