It can take six hours to fly from Chita to Moscow - or a month or two via barred trains and transit prisons.

Everyone hopes that, if Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev are to be moved to Moscow, it will be done either by plane or by non-stop train. But they could be moved to the capital in the traditional way and it is hard to be sure that they won’t be. People who’ve gone through the experience share their stories.

Alexander Podrabinek (Novaya Gazeta reporter-at-large), was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison for slandering the USSR

Being moved out of the prison usually takes about an hour- if you’re lucky or if that’s the way the authorities want it. Mikhail Khodorkovsky will probably be taken in the first instance from Chita to Irkutsk - to the transit prison there - and from there to Novosibirsk to Yekaterinburg to Moscow. If luck is on his side, those are the only three prisons he’ll see - though if they want to make things harder for him, he’ll see a good few more. I know that it once took them five months to get people from Sakhalin to Moscow.

A train-transfer usually lasts one or two days, and then you’re held in a transit cell for between three days and a week before you start the next leg. If they’re merciful, you’ll get a four-person cell, but they can be a whole lot bigger. When I was taken to a transit-prison in Yekaterinburg, I was held in a call for two hundred.

From the outside, the carriages look normal, like regular economy-class-style compartments, but the partitions are made of steel, and between the cell-partitions are blinds, bars and doors, with dining-tables out in the hall. The seats are made of wood, with each carriage-cell seating seven people - though that’s never the way it is. I was once the twenty-seventh prisoner loaded up in one.

In my time, they used to give you for the journey 650 grams of bread and some salt fish - and I don’t think anything can have dramatically changed since the 1980s - and the security was a whole lot tighter than in prison.

Those who’ve got a brain in their head lay off the salt fish, because they soon get thirsty, and the guards, being both lazy and sadistic, often don’t give you water - or they give you a lot of it and then don’t allow you out to the lavatory. Each compartment has between 15 and 20 people in it (with about ten such compartments in the carriage), so when this happens everyone starts swinging from side to side, enough for the wheels to come off the rails. The head guard rushes in to sort it out, but there’s not a lot they can do, so they in the end have to satisfy your demands.

Lawlessness, of course, is rife among the guards. They’re on temporary duty, so they often beat people up - a lot of things go on in fact. As for the cons, I don’t think they’ll have anything against Mikhail Borisovich. Any transfer is an opportunity for the prison community to get back at you for your sins: Did you cooperate with the administration or make bars for cells? Mikhail Borisovich’s reputation is pretty well spotless. He took a lot of pressure from the administration, and I think the prison community will treat him with respect, since they all know what happens inside. If an individual stands up to the pressure when they try to break him – that’s a real test. Given this, no-one will touch him, unless there’s a direct order for special treatment from the administration.

Grigory Pasko (journalist) was sentenced to over three years in prison. He was charged with treason

Khodorkovsky and Lebedev could be transferred to Moscow tomorrow - or in two years’ time. The authorities may come clean about what’s happening; they may say it’s a state secret, an investigational secret (any secret is the wisdom of idiots); or they may say, ‘Well, any transfer is unpredictable’. I had my own experience of being transferred.

Everyone in Russia must have heard about Stolypins - the transportation carriages named after Stolypin. They’ve heard it from acquaintances, relatives or books. I’d heard about them too, and read about them, and imagined what it would be like to be in one - though I never could.

Being searched before transit was like nothing else - a doddle compared with the pre-trial detention-facility. They turned everything upside down. They searched me thoroughly too. But they were also selective. They allowed me, for instance, to keep my coloured pencils, even though they were against the rules.

Then they took us to a prison-bus, which was surrounded by armed guards and dogs - something I’d only seen in movies about fascists. It seemed that nothing had changed since then. Humankind may have invented wonderful new things – mobile phones, the Internet, all kinds of robots. But when it comes to humiliating and coercing people, nothing new has been invented.

Eight people were crammed into the bus. They talked about nothing very much: when the train would leave, what direction it would go in, when we’d be in Ussuriysk.

At the station in Vladivostok, closed off, was a special train with special carriages - Stolypins. And once again there were two lines of guards with barking dogs… We literally had to jump into the carriages from the platform. In the carriage there was someone who caught us as if we were bags, and then made us go further in.

The security guards are big, tough, tight-lipped and suspicious. If they find anything unacceptable, they first beat the prisoner up and only then decide what to do about him. On several occasions I saw a prisoner who’d lagged behind a little being brutally and repeatedly beaten on the back with a truncheon.

What is a Stolypin? An ordinary carriage remade into a box for the transportation of prisoners, completely covered in metal. Each compartment has six wooden shelves. It’s cold. It’s dark. It stinks.

At about 6 o’ clock in the morning the train left. I knew that it took two hours to get to Ussuriisk. It took us eight hours. We made a lot of long stops. . .

In Ussuriysk we were once more transferred to prison-buses. ‘Quickly, quickly,’ the guards shouted, pushing us on. In the hurry, one of the prisoners forgot a water-bottle. He wanted to go back and fetch it. But he got such a blow on his back that he quickly changed his mind. . .

Arseny Roginsky (chairman of the board of the international human rights organization Memorial) was sentenced to four years in prison in Soviet times, charged with forgery

Our Stolypin trains work like shuttle buses: a prisoner travels a thousand kilometres and then he’s taken to a prison to wait for another Stolypin towards his destination. I happened to stay three times while I was being transported in Vologda prison - twice for two days, and the third time while I was waiting for the next Stolypin. You can, in fact, spend a lot of time in a transit jail. It just depends what route has been chosen for you.

Any transfer is genuinely difficult, because any new community is a test. You’re taken somewhere else where there already five to ten people, and you have to establish contact with them. Then you’re taken together to a prison bus and have to face another new community - even though you haven’t travelled more than half an hour. You’re taken to a carriage – who’ll be your fellow-inmates here? How many people will there be? There may be four of them - I had twenty.

Then you get to the other end. You enter the cell – there are twenty in there and you have to make contact with everyone, before facing another transportation, and so on. So this constant chopping and changing is a serious psychological pressure for anyone involved - and this is the main problem you have to face, not the hunger nor the cold nor the security. The guards will almost certainly eye Khodorkovsky with curiosity. But if they’re ordered to underfeed him, they’ll do so.

Transfers are usually fraught with dangers of different kinds. There may be provocations. But he’s Khodorkovsky, of course, a man well-known all over Russia - so it’s not so easy to do him harm.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s defense attorney Yuri Schmid comments:

I don’t think they’ll use regular transfer for a number of reasons - particularly because they [Khodorkovsky and Lebedev] have always been transferred separately. Besides, if moving them to Chita in the first place was illegal, they wouldn’t dare to move them to Moscow now across the entire country. They’re simply too scared. Regular transfer is hell. My father was in prison for 27 years and after his release he used to say that transfers and transportations were the worst kind of nightmare.