At billionaires' trial, a political backdrop

MOSCOW -- Oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his billionaire business partner pleaded from inside a courtroom cage yesterday to be freed pending their upcoming trial on fraud and tax evasion charges, but were ordered back to prison.

Khodorkovsky, 40, and his associate, Platon Lebedev, were brought into a courtroom in northern Moscow for the beginning of proceedings in a case widely seen as a political confrontation between Russia's richest man and President Vladimir Putin.

The trial will culminate a year-long legal campaign that could put Khodorkovsky in prison for 10 years and break up his Yukos Oil company.

The day-long hearing yesterday dealt mainly with procedural matters but offered the most extended public view of Khodorkovsky since his arrest at gunpoint last October.

When it came time to address the three-judge panel, Khodorkovsky condemned his eight-month pretrial detention as an illegal abuse of power that would only embolden the state to persecute others. ''My case is a precedent for justice in general and it will lead to hundreds of people being held in detention before their trials," Khodorkovsky told the court. He asked to be placed under house arrest instead.

Lebedev, who has reportedly grown sick during nearly a year in pretrial custody, appeared weaker and more emotional than his business partner. As he stood to address the judges, he steadied himself on the bars of a cage, in which suspects are kept during appearances in Russian courts, and complained that he had been separated from his wife and family.

The prosecutor, Dmitri Shokhin, replied that the defendants might flee or try to influence witnesses if allowed out. ''He has a passport," Shokhin said of Khodorkovsky, who has turned it over to the government. ''He has shares in foreign companies." The judges agreed and denied bail.

The proceedings that started yesterday will determine the parameters for the trial, which is expected to begin in a few weeks, according to attorneys in the case.

At stake in the trial, according to some analysts, is the future relationship between the state and private enterprise in Russia's still evolving market economy. Khodorkovsky's international team of attorneys has portrayed it as a test case for the rule of law in a country where the justice system is still dominated by the executive branch of government.

Khodorkovsky ran afoul of Putin when he defied a Kremlin dictum for business leaders to stay out of politics.

''The whole world is watching," Robert Amsterdam, a Canadian who is one of Khodorkovsky's lawyers, said outside the courthouse.