The men whispered. One made a phone call. More threats came, but Amsterdam didn’t move. Soon the Russian lawyer friend he’d called arrived and started snapping pictures.

The men’s strategy changed. They would not take him away, they said. Instead the men confiscated Amsterdam’s passport and revoked his visa, issuing him a “departure pass.” “Tomorrow you will be on a plane by 5 p.m.,” the leader declared. “If you’re not on a plane by 5 p.m., we will arrest you.”

The message was not obscure: Forget Russia. Forget Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Your work here, Mr. Amsterdam, is done.
 
Being around Robert Amsterdam is like living in a spy movie: You sense that you are being watched but can’t exactly prove it. When I first contact him about the case, he responds that it’s better not to talk details on the phone. At his home and office in London, he assumes that his phones are monitored, his emails are read, and that the Federal Security Service agency, or F.S.B.—the intelligence outfit that replaced the K.G.B.—keeps tabs on him. Most people I talk to view the claims as credible, though in time I get the sense that Amsterdam enjoys the looming risk.

“Sometimes I check myself and say, ‘Well, fuck, you know they have better things to do than deal with me.’ But then I look at who the hell is out there talking about what the Kremlin is doing, and no one is really pushing it,” he tells me one morning over espresso at a café in London. “There isn’t much doubt that they’re watching me closely. I know this. It’s the nature of these people.”

Since he moved to Britain, Amsterdam has become the leader of a full-throated campaign to free Khodorkovsky, Russia’s most famous and richest prisoner. At home, Khodorkovsky is perceived as a ghost of mobsters past as well as a sort of martyr for a better, more Westernized future. Few doubt that he did some shady, unethical things in the 1990s, a period of bare-knuckled business replete with insider deals and bribery. But he also helped advance the oil industry. In the end, his mistake seemed to be not only that he made truckloads of money in a time and place in which most didn’t, but that he didn’t know when to keep his head down and stay quiet.

After shipping the oligarch off to a Siberian work camp, the Kremlin spent the past couple of years devouring his company. Yukos, once Russia’s leading oil concern, declared bankruptcy, then was sold off to state-owned companies in rigged auctions.

Yet the Kremlin was still not sated. In February, months before he would have qualified for parole, Khodorkovsky and his partner, Platon Lebedev, were hit with a new charge: embezzling $20 billion in company money. Although the Kremlin likely perceives this event as the last chapter in the story of the oligarch and the oil company, Amsterdam disagrees.

In Russia, the case addresses issues of private wealth, the relationship of business and politics and, most significantly, the notion of energy nationalism. What happened to Yukos is seen as an object lesson in how Putin’s overreaching government is reclaiming privately held natural resources in a steroidal effort to increase the state’s economic power both at home and abroad. As Amsterdam and others see it, the Kremlin has gone corporate.

Amsterdam directs the case with an array of Russian lawyers, some of whom were associated with Yukos; one is a fugitive from Russian justice. There are clandestine meetings, ghost offices, and secret messages. As an American citizen and Canadian attorney, Amsterdam is forbidden from litigating the new trial, expected to begin in Russia this fall, but nevertheless he is considered one of the battle’s central strategists. He rallied a veteran group of Russian lawyers, shaped the line of attack, and became the fight’s public face. Amsterdam regards the case as the most important in his career; Khodor­kovsky consumes him.

In part, Amsterdam has become a Soviet-style propagandist. He speaks about the case at international conferences, runs a popular blog, and writes op-eds for international newspapers. One afternoon when I’m with him, a man calls from Mali with an idea for Khodorkovsky’s defense. Amsterdam shifts from English to French and says thanks but no thanks. “I get that all the time,” he says. “It’s strange, I know.”