Pavel Khodorkovsky

Pavel Mikhailovich Khodorkovsky (; born June 14, 1985) is a Russian businessman and political activist who has lived in the United States since 2003. He is a son of Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was once the richest person in Russia. In 2010, the younger Khodorkovsky co-founded Enertiv, an energy monitoring firm for commercial facilities.

Khodorkovsky, who like his father is a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin, is the founder of the Institute of Modern Russia.

According to the New York Observer, Khodorkovsky "possesses the familial resolve." In April 2014, Jewish Business News wrote: "It is always difficult to follow in the footsteps of a successful father, and that is what Pavel Khodorkovskiy has done, successfully too."

Early life and education Khodorkovsky was born on June 14, 1985, to Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his first wife Elena Dobrovolskaya. He is Mikhail Khodorkovsky's eldest son. His parents were divorced when he was three years old. He is one of four children of Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

The younger Khodorkovsky later described his childhood relationship with his father as "excellent" and said that his mother often let him see his father after the divorce. after which he decided to continue his studies in the U.S. According to the Moscow Times, Khodorkovsky "said he chose to study in the United States on his own and his decision was not connected with what was going on with Yukos," his father's firm, which had come under pressure from the Russian government. Khodorkovsky later said that his father had "advised [him] to study at a university abroad" but that the decision to go to the U.S. was his own. Khodorkovsky moved to the U.S. at age 18 in the autumn of 2003 to study business administration at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, which is near Boston.

At the time of the arrest, the younger Khodorkovsky was 18 and "had just been really getting to know his dad, who was divorced from his mother and had spent much of Pavel's childhood building his business and fortune."

Interviewed in New York in November 2010, Khodorkovsky said, "I never thought that I would stay here. I had another plan initially," namely to "return to Russia after graduating from college." Following his father's arrest, however, "coming to Moscow made no sense anymore." According to The Moscow Times, he "received word through his father's lawyers" after the arrest "that he should stay away from Russia for safety's sake."

The firm's offices are headquartered in New York. Investors in Enertiv include Vaidya Capital Partners and R/GA Ventures, the latter of which was set up by branding agency R/GA, part of The Interpublic Group. Other investors include Jerry Kestenbaum, president of BuildingLink; Cameron Drummond of Mastodon Capital Management; Daniel Feldman, a New York investor; Stephen Plumlee, chief operating officer of R/GA and manager of R/GA's venture unit; and Asad Husain of Bald Eagle Capital and Interpublic Group.

Activism In February 2010, Khodorkovsky founded the Institute of Modern Russia, a non-governmental human-rights organization dedicated to the promotion of democracy in Russia.

In 2017, the Institute of Modern Russia was banned by the Prosecutor General of Russia. The reason for the ban on the US-based NGO was given as "undesirable". Any association with the organization as well as its two sister organizations, UK-based Open Russia and Open Russia Civic Movement, is outlawed.

Father's release Pavel Khodorkovsky flew to Berlin with his daughter Diana to be reunited with his father after the latter's release from prison in December 2013. "I certainly knew that it hasn't been easy for him," the younger Khodorkovsky told the Telegraph. "He knows that he has had a lot of support form a lot of different people across the world, but he knows how much the family has been waiting to see him. He said to me: 'thank you for not giving up on me' which was so important to me." He described his father's release as "a big surprise – to my father as well – because no-one thought it was going to happen....Once we knew from the press conference we had no idea when or how it would happen. Certainly, no-one knew it would happen so quickly."

Khodorkovsky has severely criticized Russia's ban on U.S. adoptions of Russian children. In his Business Insider interview, he described it as "a bargaining chip for Russia, and one that Russian orphans would lose out from." He noted that "1,500 kids...are dying in orphanages every year in Russia, and those are just the official statistics....It certainly looks like they have a much better chance of getting proper medical care, and frankly surviving, here in the U.S." He stated that he was surprised at the passage of the ban, having thought that it would sweep the United Russia Party but be opposed by other parties; but "then it flew through all the three readings, almost unanimously voted for." Describing the ban as a result of the anti-Americanism that had been "fostered over the past 10 years" in Russia, he noted that many of the children in Russian orphanages that were being adopted by U.S. parents were "of Tartar, Kyrgyz, Kazakh origin, and, frankly, they're not popular with Russian foster parents." The adoption ban, he suggested, was the product of a desire "to create an additional lever" to hurt the U.S. after the realization that the prohibition of visits to Russia by U.S. officials was a non-starter, given that "not many [U.S.] officials travel to Russia. I don't think that McCain is going skiing in the Ural Mountains anytime soon."

Ancestry