In from the cold

A DARK navy suit, a white shirt and a tie sit awkwardly on Mikhail Khodorkovsky as though his slightly slouched body is still fighting these garments. Meeting a small group of Russian-speaking journalists, including your correspondent, at Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin, he is still adjusting to normal sensations, as someone who walks in from the cold and dark into a brightly lit and overheated room. Thirty-six hours earlier Mr Khodorkovsky, a former tycoon who became Russia’s most famous political prisoner, was still inside Penal Colony Number Seven, in Korelia, the north west of Russia, where he was serving his second jail term. The first one was in Siberia. His imprisonment lasted ten years altogether. “I am glad to see you all. Since most of you I met ten years ago, for me this [meeting] is a bridge to freedom,” he says quietly with a smile. Mentally, he still seems on the other shore, in a different world closed to most people in the room, where his personal space was shrunk to a...Continue reading