Once the wealthiest man in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky is today imprisoned under harsh conditions. This is the story of an unusual prisoner.

Mark Nexon, Le Point weekly, 17 April 2008

Olga and Natalya do not want to leave. They stand talking quietly, twenty metres away from the prison gates, in front of the large grey building with its small barred windows. Today they visited their fiancés who have been in prison for over a year now. “Mine has got so thin,” Olga worries. “They give him the kind of soup that even pigs wouldn’t touch.” Have they heard of Mikhail Khodorkovsky? Of course. This morning they even caught a glimpse of him when they were inside. He was handcuffed and wearing tracksuit trousers: “There were three men with him in masks.” Suddenly Natalya’s phone rings. “Oh, it’s you,” she cries and gazes above the wall bristling with barbed wire. Her fiancé Igor is on the other end of the line, having managed to get held of a mobile phone inside the prison. Igor agrees to answer one question: “I know nothing about Khodorkovsky. I see only the window of his cell, that’s all.”

It’s not surprising. Once the richest in Russia, Khodorkovsky is today imprisoned and under the closest surveillance. He was sent here, to Siberia where the Gulag had many of its notorious labour camps, to a place 300 kms from Mongolia where the winter temperature falls below -30 degrees centigrade. What was his crime? Officially, it is said to be tax evasion on a particularly large scale. The true reason is to be found elsewhere, in Khodorkovsky’s financing of opposition parties. This was unforgivable from the Kremlin’s point of view. “Putin decided that this rich, clever man wanted to steal power from him,” says Russian journalist Valery Panyushkin, author of the book The Captive of Silence (Khodorkovsky, Le prisonnier du silence, 2007). On 25 October 2003 his fate was sealed. When Khodorkovsky flew to Novosibirsk he was arrested on leaving the airplane. Nineteen months later he was already serving an eight-year sentence. His company Yukos had become the largest oil company in Russia and at one time produced more oil than Kuwait. Now it collapsed and its remnants were divided up and handed over to State-run corporations. So the case is finished and done with? Nothing of the kind. Russian prosecutors are preparing new charges against the businessman of embezzling $20 billion. This is the equivalent of 6 years gross income for Yukos. “It’s absurd!” exclaims Khodorkovsky from his prison cell. This time the former oil magnate is menaced by 22 years behind bars.

This is very harsh for a political crime. Protests by Western countries have had no effect. “Khodorkovsky knew that he faced the threat of the Russian authorities,” continues Panyushkin, “but did not believe things would go so far.” Despite everything Khodorkovsky has not given up. His year in the penal colony at Krasnokamensk, a district of uranium mines near the Chinese frontier, lies behind him. While there he made mittens eight hours a day. Three times the warders put him in the punishment block, for two lemons that they found among his belongings and for a cup of tea that he drank at the wrong time. Every other month his family could come to see him for 72 hours. That was how the time passed until the second investigation began.

In December 2006 the authorities changed their strategy. Khodorkovsky was transferred to Chita, the regional capital, a city of 350,000 inhabitants. In the centre is a marble statue of Lenin and a pink three-storey building that is home to the local FSB. When Khodorkovsky was moved to No IZ-75/1, the Region’s pre-trial detention centre, he saw a different picture. The building was erected before the 1917 Revolution and stands two tram stops from Lenin Square. “An appalling place,” sighs Oleg Kuznetsov, a local teacher who managed to visit Khodorkovsky there. “It’s impossible to breathe and there is mould on the walls.” Over two thousand prisoners are crammed into the building, some already convicted, others awaiting trial: officially, there is only room for 700 inmates. One man I talked to had spent nine months in the prison for smuggling timber into China. Sasha was freed in February 2007. “There were 40 of us in an 18 square metre cell with only 8 beds,” Sasha told me. “Everyone was coughing and smoking. Some caught TB and 15 of the inmates were sick.”

A special prisoner

For Khodorkovsky, who is wholly cut off from prison life, all is different. Sasha knows that. For three months he was in the same building as the former billionaire. “I was on the first floor and he was on the second floor, immediately above me.” The conditions? A 15 square metre cell and an old television. Day and night 20 warders keep watch over their prisoner, ensuring that he does not come into contact with anyone. “They come here from other parts of the country and are constantly being replaced,” explains Sasha. Khodorkovsky is forbidden to mix with other prisoners. “Twice I met him in the corridor,” says Vladimir who was released last summer. “The warders immediately made me face the wall. If you so much as mention his name you can find yourself in the punishment cell.” “One or two prisoners are regularly put in Khodorkovsky’s cell as informers, who pass on all they learn to the administration; they’re also there to stop him committing suicide,” adds Sasha.

Khodorkovsky’s days are regulated down to the last minute. He gets up at 6 am and has an hour to exercise in a yard 30 square metres in size with netting above. For the rest of the time he reads. Over the last nine months he has read about a hundred books and the sixty periodicals to which he subscribes, among them the British weekly The Economist. “I used to pass him crossword puzzles through the warders,” says Sasha. For the most part, however, Khodorkovsky is reading the documentation of the new case. There are hundreds of kilograms of documents confiscated by the investigators, including bills for ironing bed linen, photographs and private letters. “It’s a muddled selection that follows no logic and proves nothing,” indignantly declares Vadim Klyuvgant, one of Khodorkovsky’s lawyers. “However, we are checking everything for fear that we might find some forgery.”

The authorities have indeed proved their determination. In October 2007 Khodorkovsky had served half his sentence and became eligible for parole. No chance of that. A week earlier he was reprimanded by the prison administration for returning from exercise without holding his hands behind his back. Khodorkovsky protested and asked to be shown the CCTV recording. The cameras were not filming, they replied, when he re-entered the building. The only chance in his daily routine to leave the prison is when Khodorkovsky goes to read the documentation of the new case. He is driven for ten minutes in a white van with tinted windows to the prosecutor’s office.

From his cell window Sasha often tried to communicate with Khodorkovsky. “Hey, Misha Yukos! Have you got a DVD player?” he once asked. Khodorkovsky has the time to nod in reply. “I wanted to lend him a film about the war in Afghanistan but his guards wouldn’t let me — they thought there must be some coded message on the disk.” The paranoia that surrounds the country’s most famous prisoner has not yet subsided. Yury, a former prison cook, recalls, “When he came here we were ordered to open all canned food [he received] and tip the contents into plastic bags. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with them.”

Apart from the heavily guarded floor where Khodorkovsky is held, the Chita prison follows its own rules. There is a precise hierarchy among prisoners and a loyalty to their elder, who is serving time for killing a policeman and exercises the power of life or death over the others. “Last year one lad knew he was doomed after stealing from a cellmate,” former prisoner Vladimir tells me. “He preferred to hang himself before he was killed.” Corruption is rife. “You can buy anything from the warders,” Vladimir continues. A mobile phone for your cell, drugs, vodka even a prostitute for 15,000 roubles (440 euros).” And does Khodorkovsky have a mobile phone? Sasha smiles. “He’s deprived of freedom in the full sense of the word.”

Hunger strike

As soon as he was transferred to Chita his family visits were strictly regulated: a three-hour visit once a month. “Two and a half hours, to be exact,” says Khodorkovsky’s mother Marina Philippovna, “because you must first pass through about twenty doors.” She last saw her son on 20 March.

We are visiting Marina Philippovna at Koralovo, the boarding school for deprived children 50 kms from Moscow that was set up by Mikhail Khodorkovsky. “My prison visits always follow the same pattern. The warder sits beside us and hears all we say,” she tells me. “All we can do is to exchange winks.” She gets up to turn off the kettle. “Misha has lost a lot of weight. He’s two sizes smaller now but he is not downhearted.” She talks of the hunger strike her son declared in February to support a former Yukos manager [Vasily Aleksanyan] who was being refused medical treatment. “They sent a psychiatrist to persuade him to end his hunger strike,” she continues. ‘Do you consider me mad?’ he asked the psychiatrist. In the end, he was calming down the doctor ... When he told me this story we both laughed so hard we cried.”

At this moment Khodorkovsky’s father Boris appears. Without a word he shows me a photo on which Putin is shaking Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s hand. “There is an enormous gap between what Putin says and what he does,” Marina Philippovna comments. Will their son be freed? The family now hope that the new president will pardon Khodorkovsky. For the time being Dmitry Medvedev is studying the issue. “Everything depends on the judicial system,” the new president has said. “We hope that Medvedev cares about public opinion in the West,” adds Marina Philippovna. “But my son does not complain. He always tells, ‘Don’t worry, mama, I’m not wasting my time here. I can read everything I would never have managed to read otherwise. I’ve had three lives already, as a student, a businessman and a prisoner: there’ll be a fourth.’” Khodorkovsky agreed to answer from prison our question about his plans when he is released. “I will see whether the country needs my knowledge and experience,” he writes. “I don’t know whether he’ll go into politics,” concludes Marina Philippovna, “but he’ll certainly get involved in education. He believes that democracy begins with education.”

Khodorkovsky’s friend, the unfrocked priest

“You see I have cut my hair and beard,” says Sergei Taratukhin in a trembling voice. “The priesthood was my vocation,” but he was punished for linking his name with that of Khodorkovsky. When the oligarch was sent to the penal colony in Siberia in 2005 Father Sergy was a priest in Krasnokamensk. The authorities asked him to consecrate a penitentiary facility. He refused. During the Soviet period Taratukhin spent four years in the Gulag for dissident and anti-communist activities. He is ready to defend any “political prisoner”. He even visited Khodorkovsky in his cell. He cheered him up and said he must not get downhearted. He went too far ... The Orthodox Church expelled him. A year later he could not stand it and recanted. That was insufficient, however. Today he is a caretaker and runs the shop in a church in Chita. “I have asked them to restore me to holy orders and let me serve in the smallest church in Siberia, if necessary ...” Nothing doing.

“What Khodorkovsky did was quite serious,” pronounces Yevdokimov, the Bishop of Chita, after the service. “He didn’t find himself in prison for nothing,” says the hierarch, before getting into his Toyota Landcruiser. “It’s true that I have not changed my opinion about Khodorkovsky,” says the ex-priest, sitting on a bench on Lenin Square. He opens his notebook and points to a prayer that he wrote and repeats daily: “Lord, forgive all those who torment Khodorkovsky!”