On 26 June Mikhail Khodorkovsky will be 45. His admirers throughout Russia are not ignoring the event.

In Tomsk they will mark the date with a picket on Novosboronnaya Square, to be held from 1 to 2 pm on Thursday. Last week residents of Tomsk sent a greetings card to the jail in Chita. Olga Kovtonyuk met with Ludmila Korneyeva, who heads the Tomsk committee in support of Khodorkovsky. She sang me the following song:

Far, far away, in the frost and mists,
where soaring mountains are covered in pine and in larch,
where the forests stretch for thousands of miles,
where silence and a cosmic peace reign,
there lives a man known to all the wide world.

By evil will imprisoned,
he was brought there from far, far away
and the way to freedom was closed!

Ludmila Korneyeva wrote both the words and the music and intends to sing a part of this song to Khodorkovsky’s mother Marina during the picket on 26 June. They keep in contact and Ludmila knows in detail the life Mikhail leads in the Chita detention centre.

“Yukos and Khodorkovsky himself did quite a lot for the city of Tomsk and the Tomsk Region. They invested money in further and higher education and in welfare programmes. I consider it shameful of our city to have joyfully accepted all this when Khodorkovsky was able to help us and then, when he fell on hard times, not to find within ourselves the moral fibre to support him,” says the Khodorkovsky support committee, which forms part of the Tomsk branch of the United Civil Front.

(Echo Moskvy, FederalPress, 24.06.2008)