Julia Ioffe: Can an exiled oligarch persuade Russia that Putin must go?

Russian former oil tycoon and Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky attends a meeting of the German-Russia forum in Berlin on Sept. 23, 2014.
It has been a year since the guards at a prison camp just below the Arctic Circle told Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon and once the richest man in Russia, to pack his things. They put him on a plane to St. Petersburg; there they handed him a parka and a passport and put him on a flight to Berlin. Since that day of release and exile, Khodorkovsky has been living outside Zurich and travelling to capitals throughout the West, making speeches, accepting awards, and hinting broadly at a return to Russia. He will tell anyone who asks that, after a decade in various prison camps, he would not mind displacing the man who sent him there -- Vladimir Putin.