The Russia Conundrum

CHAPTER 12

GULAG

The Kremlin took a rather touching amount of care in picking the labour camp to which I would be assigned. Despite having 766 penal colonies to choose from, and notwithstanding a provision in Russian law that prisoners should serve their term in a facility close to their home town, I was sent to camp IK14/10, 3,000 miles from Moscow, in the Chita region of Siberia. Chita has average temperatures of plus 45°C in summer and minus 45°C in winter. Our prison barracks were built next to the slagheaps of a uranium mine, where radiation levels were high. In Russian prisons, nine out of ten inmates suffer from at least one chronic disease, with one in three displaying symptoms of serious contagious infection. Platon Lebedev, if this were possible, had things even harder, being despatched to a remote prison colony near the town of Kharp in the Arctic Circle, where the distance from Moscow made it almost impossible for his family and legal team to visit him.

For the first few months, while we were awaiting our trial, I was held in remand prison 99/1 in Moscow. For much of the time, there were just three prisoners in a cell that was built for four. The cell was 4 metres by 5 metres, including the toilet area, which was separated with a partition and a curtain, although it didn’t reach up to the ceiling. As well as the toilet bowl, we had a sink with hot and cold water. Our cell was quite new and clean, with a small television, a fridge that was old but usually worked, and a fan. There were four bunks on two levels – like in a train compartment, only made of metal. The window was covered in non-transparent tape, and there were two metal grilles on either side of the glass, with a small ventilating window that we could open. We were taken to have a shower once a week.

There was a kiosk that we could visit once a month. It didn’t have any delicacies, but the essentials were all there – milk, kefir, sour cream, apples, carrots, oranges, etc. We also got parcels from home, but these didn’t help much. The prison authorities inspected everything and didn’t let much through; whatever did get through would be cut up into little pieces. The main thing was that the parcel came from home, which psychologically was very important and counted for a lot.

We were allowed out for exercise once a day for one hour. I used to take walks on the roof of the building, like a cat, because it was the closest to fresh air – but you never got to see the sun because there was a canopy over it. The radio was played all day and that drove me crazy – with pop music and the endless ‘letters from listeners’ that they broadcast. The light was kept on at night, but that’s something you get used to. Jail food is awful. I don’t doubt that the fat and carbohydrate contents match the officially prescribed norms, but the way it is cooked – I don’t even want to think about it.

I was allowed to work on my defence papers for our court appearance – the only problem was getting access to data and information. On days when I knew I was due in court, I wouldn’t eat anything before I went, as I didn’t want to have a problem during the endless hours they kept me in the prison van and then in court, when the guards often neglected to provide toilet breaks; I would eat in the evenings instead. There were searches every day, both personal and in the cell. The guards were polite, but thorough. Four to six searches every day – at least it provided a diversion.

Once we’d had our day in court and got our expected sentences, Platon and I were sent our separate ways to the camps. Where you’re going, and how you’re going, are kept secret. The guards put you in a special railway carriage, a sort of prison on wheels, divided up into cells with guards patrolling the corridor, and it’s only at some station stop en route that you hear an announcement, ‘The Moscow to Chita train will be leaving from track two.’ That’s when I knew where we were going. Six days later, having read a whole bag full of books, we arrived. I say ‘we’, but in fact I was the only prisoner in the whole carriage. They took me out of the train and bundled me into a paddy wagon to take me to the camp. There, I was made to walk the gauntlet between two lines of barking mongrels with soldiers holding them back. A group of officers ordered me to doff my hat. I knew the order was illegal, because I’d had plenty of time to learn the law, but I did it anyway. There was no point picking a fight over nothing. They confiscated all my possessions that they said were ‘not allowed’ and, again, I didn’t protest. The main thing was that they left me my books and notebooks, having had a good rummage through them.

Life in the camp is better than in prison. In prison, you’re locked in a small room with the same people all day; in the camp, you can walk around as much as you want. The sun, the sky, greenery in summer, which in prison you can’t see, is all important for a person’s wellbeing. After a year in prison, you really suffer from the lack of such simple things. And your health, of course, is undermined: your eyes, your muscles, your immune system. Human beings are not designed for a prison cell: your body protests.

A few days after arriving in the camp, I was called before a committee headed by the camp commander and was told that I had been assigned to work in the sewing workshop. I was immediately suspicious. Sewing professionally requires training. As soon as I saw the equipment, I knew it was a trap. It was simply impossible to meet the required production standards on such machines. Later, the young staff in the administration section told me they had actually been planning to put me in the bakery, which is considered safe, but they had received a phone call from Moscow telling them to put me in sewing.

I wrote a complaint – the first of several⁹ – claiming I had poor vision, and deliberately failed the workplace exam, having warned them that if they falsified the exam results, I’d kick up a fuss. My engineering training had allowed me to spot so many safety breaches in the way the camp workshops were run that they filled two whole sheets of paper, with a list of the most serious violations that legally require production to stop until they are rectified. I politely gave the list to the boss and two days later I received a notification: I was being transferred to work as a porter.

Shortly afterwards, the camp commander invited me in for a ‘talk’. He didn’t say so explicitly, but it was clear that he had received an order to treat me harshly. To put it bluntly, he’d been told to treat me ‘like dirt’ and it seemed like he wanted my help to show he was doing his job. He was on the point of striking a deal with me, but at the last minute he couldn’t bring himself to do it and we parted with matters unresolved.

The upshot was that they started giving me spells in a cramped punishment cell where the bed is lowered from the wall only at night. I responded by going to court. The administration were stunned, but I had learned my way around the judicial system and I was granted a hearing, right there in the camp. The chairman of the city court announced that he was going to take evidence, but the camp authorities were prepared and had a trick up their sleeve. They summoned a ‘witness’ from among the prisoners, someone they had evidently lined up to make accusations against me that would send me back to the cooler for an even longer period. But, unexpectedly, the ‘witness’ couldn’t go through with the lies. He turned around and pointed at the head of department. ‘He forced me to lie,’ he told the court. ‘He gave me cigarettes. Here they are – you can have them back; but I’m going to tell the truth.’

Everyone was taken aback. I pulled myself together, just in time to hear the chairman of the court say to the camp commander, ‘Cancel the defendant’s punishment! And as for the witness, if you punish him, I will personally lay charges against you.’¹⁰

That’s how things went on from that time forward: I would be given a punishment; I would be put in the cooler; I would complain to the court and the court would cancel the punishment. In between times, I worked and got to know my fellow prisoners. We had illiterate shepherds from ‘nearby’ villages (meaning only 300–400km away) and miners from the uranium pits; we had ordinary, law-abiding citizens and we had big bosses from the criminal world. We had normal people and we had complete villains, young men who had been sentenced to ten years as minors for serial murder and were serving out the end of their sentence in an adult camp, without understanding that their next murder would mean life imprisonment. There simply were no constraints on these men.

It was a strange mixture, with all of us kept in a single pot, corralled by the prison authorities or by the leaders of the criminal gangs that ruled the roost in the camps. We all shared a common understanding of how we should deal with each other, of the limits of acceptable personal behaviour, and an acute awareness of interdependence. A truly antisocial personality in the camp was a rarity, and they were quickly dealt with by the administration or by the other prisoners. The methods varied from confinement in a specially created ‘ghetto’ to full ‘serious bodily harm’.

My position was a bit of an anomaly. For the first year, prison society couldn’t fit me into any of the usual categories. The criteria for these are clear: if you collaborate with the camp authorities, you are a ‘red’; if you stand up for yourself and suffer for it, you are ‘black’; if you work and you bow the knee to the criminal kingpins, you are a ‘peasant’; if you refuse to work, make people pay attention to your views and defend the idea of individual freedoms from the yoke of the state, you are an ‘authority’. As for me, I worked and I interacted with the authorities; but I also spent considerably more time in the cooler than anyone and I certainly wasn’t a ‘squealer’; I conversed with the career criminals who ran camp life, but I never kowtowed to them in any way.

At the end of my stay in Chita, I had an interesting conversation with one of them. He was one of the more respected gang bosses in the criminal hierarchy and he had just been told he was being transported to the fearsome Blagoveshchensk camp, where people of his kind are taken to be broken. He knew what lay ahead and awaited it with open eyes, defending his individualistic world view, which I would describe as close to nineteenth-century-style anarchism. This was a very deep person, a man of strong will and convictions, despite not yet being 30 years old. He told me that in ordinary life, he and I would certainly have been enemies since my goals were the opposite of his, but now we were both battling against an unjust and oppressive state, simply using different methods to do so. I would say that his assessment pretty much summed up people’s attitude towards me in the camp: I was an outsider, but one deserving respect.

In the hut where I was assigned a place, there were anywhere from 70 to 150 people at different times. Most didn’t stay long – around three to six months before they were transferred. If someone came up to me openly and didn’t get punished, I knew he was a ‘spy’ for the administration who wrote reports for the Security Section; anyone else would get sent to isolation. That was the way the camp administration thought they could ‘keep me under control’, by deciding who I could speak to and who would be allowed to be in my social circle.

In April 2006, two-and-a-half years into my sentence, I was woken in the night by the blow of a knife striking my head. I jumped up with blood flowing on to my mattress in time to see the man running away. He had wanted to stick the knife into my eye, but in the dark he missed and just slashed my face. He soon was transferred closer to the city of Chita where his family lived.

The prisoners who did the administration’s bidding and came to spy on me were flawed people who had problems, real or imagined, with the rest of the inmates – and that meant they could be easily manipulated. One of these ‘agents’ was very afraid of another prisoner who was menacing him with terrible threats, including bodily harm. The authorities used this to blackmail him. The prisoner figured that the only way to get himself transferred to another camp was to try to stab me.

As for me, the authorities spotted their opportunity: this was the perfect pretext to put me in permanent solitary confinement. They made a camp announcement that Khodorkovsky was in fear for his life and had asked to be transferred to ‘a safe place’. Of course, solitary is the opposite of a safe place; it is the direct road to the cemetery, both literally and figuratively. I knew I couldn’t afford to let it happen so I decided to go down fighting.

I went on a ‘dry’ hunger strike – no food, no liquids – the second time I had done so. The first had been in the Matrosskaya Tishina prison in Moscow, after Platon Lebedev had been taken to the punishment cells and told he would never get out alive. I had fasted for six days before Platon was released and by then I was on the brink. When you go ‘dry’, your blood thickens and your blood pressure shoots up. Mine reached 180 and the doctors said the next thing on the horizon would be blood clots and a stroke. But the advantage is that this forces the authorities to make quick decisions. You’re at risk of dying as early as the third day and almost no one survives more than ten, while the usual ‘wet’ hunger strike gets dangerous only after 30–60 days.

This time, I found it particularly tough going. Evidently, my health wasn’t that good any more. By the fourth day, I couldn’t walk and I was fainting. When the doctor came, he informed me that the camp commander had accepted my demand. I was transferred to the infirmary, where I spent several days trying to put my body right.

When Putin brought new charges against me in February 2006 and I was recalled to prison, the head of the camp operations department personally carried all my belongings to the transport. He even brought a mattress and a blanket. We parted on companionable terms. His last words were, ‘Just don’t come back!’

The overall changes to the gulag system since the days of Stalin are enormous. For a start, no one is deliberately starved any more. There were and are still instances of people dying from lack of food; in the early 2000s, there were even entire de facto ‘hunger camps’, but these are the result of conflicts on the ground, mismanagement or corrupt officials stealing supplies, rather than official government policy.

Prisoners are not worked to death through slave labour any more. Sometimes there’s even the opposite problem of camps with no work at all. In these places, prisoners become stupefied, like animals, and lose all their social skills (if they had them in the first place). Nowadays, no one is punished for not working, but attempts at escaping are punished very harshly.

The camp bosses can no longer kill a prisoner out of hand, as they used to in the past. Beating and torture can and does happen, but killing is prohibited. Doing so would require a massive amount of paperwork. This ban on killing, of course, gets broken just like any other ban, but the situation is very different from when camp officials had the unfettered right to kill their prisoners.

The living conditions are hard, but they are no longer murderous. For example, in winter they try to stop the temperature inside the barracks dropping below zero and they supply water, albeit cold, so prisoners can wash themselves and their clothes. It is ‘trifles’ such as these that make the difference between life and death.

But other things in the gulag have remained very much the same. In the camps, a prisoner is not a person; he is an animal, even though his value to his owner has increased significantly since the Stalin years. You can’t kill him, but you can, and should, beat him. You can’t starve him, but neither do you have to worry about the quality of his food. Neither do you need to worry about ethical considerations in the way you treat a prisoner: you can and should lie, deceive, play prisoners off one against the other and routinely show contempt. As always, there are exceptions. There are officials who wouldn’t allow themselves to bully prisoners and there are prisoners who wouldn’t allow themselves to be bullied. But it was like that in the old gulag, too. Back then, a prisoner’s life was at stake, while now it’s ‘merely’ his health and his chances of early release.

Health remains a ‘second tier’ priority in Russia and the quality of healthcare in society as a whole leaves much to be desired, so you can imagine how much worse it is in the camps. Personally, I was lucky on the two occasions when I needed healthcare. The first time I went under the knife, I had a military surgeon with a steady hand. The second time, when I needed to be sewn up after I was stabbed, by good luck the man who was listed as a dentist turned out to be a facial surgeon and now, thanks to him, the scar on my face is not noticeable. But my experience is the exception. More typical is the experience of a prisoner I knew who was viciously beaten. He was taken to a medical unit, which was just the other side of the fence from our hut, so in the evening I shouted through the barbed wire to ask how he was. Someone shouted back that he was not doing well and would probably die. The paramedics had applied first aid, but no one did anything else for him and now he was lying on his back, unconscious. I told the administration that if the man died, I wouldn’t keep silent about it. An hour later, a doctor came from town. The telephone in the medical unit was not working, so the whole camp watched as the doctor had to run first to the control room and then wait for an ambulance to move him. We held our breath. He had a ruptured spleen and by the time he was put on the operating table he had lost more than two litres of blood from internal bleeding, but the prisoner was saved.

Today’s gulag is survivable, although a person’s place in the world of the camps depends on the individual. You mustn’t allow yourself to be afraid. The result of doing that is a terrible life, and I am not exaggerating when I say that it can seem a fate worse than death. As for death, people do die inside, although not in alarming numbers.

The camps have their advantages over prison. You get to see the sun and you receive visits. You can have a family visit four times a year, each time for three days, and you spend it in a room that feels a bit like a provincial hotel. In prison, the only visits are by intercom, through glass and bars. In the camps, you get to see your mother, your wife or your daughter, and you can touch them, kiss them, hug them. Such bliss. The time flies by in an instant.

On the other hand, prison can destroy families. Only one in 20 prisoners get regular visits. Wives leave their husbands; children forget their parents. Within five years, most people have lost their support network. Outside the gates is a desert awaiting them, which is why returns are so common. Whoever created and perpetuated this system – their reasons are beyond me. Perhaps it’s not done out of malice, simply through inertia, but the consequences are awful. A whole host of discarded people. Millions of families and lives destroyed. There needs to be a humane alternative that keeps hope alive. Everyone knows this, yet nothing changes.

For those inside the camps, there is the problem of the opposite sex. It is hardest for young prisoners aged between 18 and 35, especially those who have come from a camp for minors and have no real experience of a regular sex life. Those who are older don’t suffer quite as much from its absence, possibly because of the stressful situation they are in. Inside, you can talk about these things quite calmly. Family is another matter. Family issues are a minefield that you tread on at your peril; talking about them can unleash the cruellest thoughts, depression, even suicide.

By and large, I didn’t suffer from obsessive thoughts and memories or the sort of depression that afflicted many other prisoners. I can remember a few nights, though, when I couldn’t sleep. This was especially true in the first year of my imprisonment when radio and TV channels were talking every day about my company being wrecked. All the lies and propaganda weighed on me. I had techniques to keep my mind under control. For example, I would start mentally writing a letter or building a house. I took pleasure in slowly ‘furnishing’ the room with imaginary furniture and appliances. I discovered that the best way to release the tension was by putting my thoughts on paper. I started writing theoretical speeches and letters and complaints. None of it was for public consumption. When you’re getting things off your chest, it isn’t for other people to read. And when you reread it much later, the writing may not be very good or coherent, but I have got into the habit of putting my thoughts on paper and I’ve become quite proficient at it. As a schoolkid who didn’t like writing and usually asked my favourite girl friends to write my essays for me, this is an achievement.

I also took pleasure in practical things. Household chores are not a problem for me. Until I was 30, I did my own housework and washed my laundry, even when there was no hot water. Prison isn’t home, but these skills help; and your relatives support you by sending you things that are allowed. The biggest problem is that you’re not allowed to have a computer, so there’s a lack of access to information. Not only up-to-the-minute information, but useful information in general. There’s a limit on how many books you can take into prison, so having a lawyer coming in from time to time is invaluable.

Another skill that helped me in jail was the ability to concentrate on a task and block out unnecessary thoughts. For the full working day, eight hours or more, I made myself think in a disciplined manner about concrete, practical problems that I could actually do something about, and not to dwell on those I was powerless to tackle. I used to take short breaks and relax by thinking about something pleasant. And at the end of my working day, I switched off my brain by thinking positively about my family and friends. I liked to remember and daydream about seeing them again.

In some ways, prison is like a magnifying glass for observing social processes that are going on outside. When living standards fell sharply in Russia after 1998, prisoners were literally eating grass. Cases of dysentery were reputedly in the thousands. In my time in prison, I was struck by the number of illiterate young people I met, 20-year-olds completely unable to read or write. Then I was a witness to the shift in the population of Moscow’s notorious Matrosskaya Tishina prison, when the usual deviants and street criminals were replaced en masse by people whose property had been stolen from them by raiders in uniform. I saw these people forced to sign documents giving up the right to their property and come out with or without sentences. And I saw crooked law enforcement officers who were sent to prison when conflicts broke out between agencies. In jail, despite all the limitations, much of what happens outside is plain to see.

Being in prison is akin to acquiring a sensory disability, where one failing sense is compensated for by the others becoming sharper. In place of absent external stimuli comes a greater sensitivity to the remaining ones, the hidden clues that betray people’s real intentions. Those who have been in prison for a long time react more sharply to events and are much more sensitive to those around them. Prisoners released after a long spell inside say that, for the first few months, they can read people like an open book, until this acquired ‘super-sensitivity’ begins to fade. I experienced it myself.

Prison also distorts ethical standards, especially in young minds. While in normal life 95 per cent of people consider lying to be something that is bad, and cruelty to be abnormal, in prison this is not the case. You mustn’t lie to ‘your’ people and you mustn’t steal from them, but otherwise cruelty is the norm. Such rules apply not only in the criminal community; collaborators with the administration and the administration itself operate by the same standards. The camp is a big village, where everyone knows everything about everybody. Nothing can be hidden: the camp authorities divide and rule, setting you up, beating you in the punishment cell, buying services – and it’s all done openly. Drug dealing is the only thing that takes place surreptitiously, even though everyone knows about the drugs and who uses what. In the camps, for example, there are bricks of hashish and marijuana, which nearly everyone smoked in season. It has a strange, sweet smoke, which is very particular. When I first arrived, I couldn’t understand why people were behaving as if they were drunk.

Prison changed me. I reassessed my understanding of the importance of relationships with my family and loved ones. My understanding of the world evolved, too. I think it’s noticeable in the articles I wrote while inside. Prison magnifies emotions, including outbreaks of anger or despair that periodically erupt. The question then becomes: can I control myself? And for me, luckily, the answer was yes. I felt despair and anger, but I kept a lid on it. That’s how I am in most aspects of life. I found it helped to pour things on to paper, rather than on to those around me.

I have always found it hard to express my emotions. I was brought up with the belief that it’s unseemly for a man to be sentimental. To poke fun – yes; sometimes even very sarcastically, including at myself, and especially at the powers that be. But never to show real, genuine emotions. I show emotions when I interact with my children; perhaps I’m a little more sentimental with my family and friends. But I almost never experience strong emotions outside of that circle. Neither the prosecutors nor Putin nor Sechin trouble my deepest emotions. They’re like a rain shower in autumn: an unpleasant natural phenomenon, nothing more.

Some people say I’m a bit of a robot, and there may be some truth in that. My threshold for strong emotional engagement is high. For me to get angry, something really extreme has to happen. But, on the other hand, I am easily offended by cases of manifest injustice, even in small things. The initial hearing in our first trial at Moscow’s Basmanny Court was a shock for me. People simply didn’t listen. I wanted to say, ‘Wait a minute, where’s your evidence for that? Haven’t you dreamed it all up? Why does your word count more than mine? Why should I have to go to prison because of your paranoia?’ But no one cares about your questions. The law in Putin’s Russia consists of meaningless pieces of paper.

That upsets me. Sometimes, you feel as if you have been kidnapped by aliens. They aren’t the enemy, they aren’t fascists; they’re just extra-terrestrials who happen to look like us, but having nothing whatsoever in common with human beings. You just have to accept that there’s no way you can talk to them about anything. And that’s how you calm yourself down. I started seeing prison, the courts and the investigators as some sort of natural phenomenon that could be studied with an objective eye, but to which it’s pointless to respond emotionally.

What was harder to deal with was the unknown. Not what’s happening to you personally, but what’s going on at home, with your family and friends. Sometimes days or even weeks go by before you receive responses to questions you desperately want to have answered. There are plenty of hidden phones in prison, and for many they’re a lifeline, but not everyone has access to them. I never did.

The authorities use psychological ploys. Your own destiny is kept secret from you, even in its tiniest details, which is a form of psychological torture. Why you’ve been summoned … where they’re taking you – no one will tell you. ‘Take your things’, ‘Don’t take your things’, ‘Bring your papers’, ‘Leave your papers behind’, ‘Put your coat on’, ‘Don’t put your coat on’; all that deliberately keeps you guessing. If a document arrives concerning your case, they keep it back from you; you are only given it when the investigator comes to question you or your own lawyer brings it to you on a visit. The purpose is clear – so you don’t have time to prepare or consult.

The endless, humiliating searches get you down at first, but you slowly become used to them. They happen up to six times a day and of course it’s bad. But the bar of human dignity has been lowered. If you don’t want to sink under the weight of it all, you have to make yourself fight in your heart for every little thing. You need to push yourself: regular exercise, cleanliness, daily work, politeness in dealing with every person. It may all seem obvious, but it isn’t obvious when the authorities try, year in, year out, to break you through hopelessness and the prospect of oblivion, and the repellent prison practices that wear you down.

Prison makes conversation more important than it is on the outside. Conversation on all manner of topics. There is a premium attached to people who can speak about the law. Very few prisoners have their own lawyers, and the state-appointed ones aren’t worth much, so a prisoner who knows the law and doesn’t mind sharing his knowledge is much in demand. I did this myself. The ‘professional’ consultations I used to provide weren’t very complicated; they didn’t need to be. The majority of Russian judges know the criminal code, criminal procedure and a few Supreme Court rulings. But even this much they don’t know very well. It means it’s easy to predict their mistakes. Spotting flaws in a prisoner’s verdict can give him reasonable grounds for an appeal and make him very grateful. I would say that in two cases out of three you can find something in any sentence that you can latch on to so they can demand a review. Many cases give you a nasty feeling when you read them, while others make you wonder if the people making the judgements are living in another reality. It doesn’t take long to figure out what is truth and what is lies. For the majority of professional judges, it’s not a secret either; it’s just not in their interest to say anything about it.

In prison, you have to put all of this into perspective. And you have to stay calm. Prison allows for introspection and a deeper analysis of external reality. The pace of life slows down. It’s a curious paradox – every day drags on slowly, but weeks, months and years fly by. One thing I learned in prison that I did not have before is patience. When I was free, an hour seemed a long time; but in prison, it’s a moment. Prison lets you go deeper into your thoughts. The quality of concentration is absolute. My ten years inside were a chance to think, to read and to learn. I thought about myself and my family, my life and my beliefs; I thought about Russia and what my country stands for. I read Solzhenitsyn, but I didn’t take any great inspiration from him – I felt these were the writings not of a fighter, but of an opportunist. I would never condemn someone whose aim is survival and who writes about surviving as an achievement. I simply didn’t find it inspiring. Vasily Grossman and Varlam Shalamov, on the other hand, I found full of integrity, if also very harsh. You read them and you know that these are people whose example you want to follow; they make you want to keep on fighting.

In prison, with pen and notebook

Former Yukos lawyer Vasily Aleksanyan sits in court

I felt responsible for my friends and colleagues who were arrested with me and who were suffering in captivity. Vasily Aleksanyan, our former Yukos lawyer, was diagnosed with AIDS in prison and the authorities denied him life-saving drugs unless he agreed to testify against me. Vasily refused to perjure himself and I again went on dry hunger strike to demand he be transferred to hospital. The demand was met after ten days, but it was too late – they let him out just in time for him to die in freedom. Despite the efforts of his family and friends, Vasily Aleksanyan fell victim to the vindictiveness of the system. Just like Sergei Magnitsky, the Hermitage Capital tax adviser who perished in police custody, my friend was the victim of a ruthless state apparatus.

After an international outcry and the intervention of Western politicians including Angela Merkel and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, I was released in December 2013 and put on a plane to the West. I was able to meet my young granddaughter for the first time and to spend time with my parents. It was an emotional moment. My mother had fallen ill while I was in jail and she died soon after my release.

It is clear that Putin wanted to release me, not least because keeping me in jail was making him look bad in the eyes of the world, but because he also wanted to brush up his image ahead of the Sochi Winter Olympics in February 2014.

How did I feel when I was released? Joy to see my family was the predominant emotion. And it was nice to eat proper food again. As for things that surprised me, I’d say the power of social media was the biggest shock. I read a lot when I was inside, so I had a theoretical understanding of everything that was happening, even of iPhones; but the whole phenomenon of social media in practice was a culture shock. Nothing prepared me for the extent of the influence it has had on humankind. Technology had made communication so fast and so efficient.

I kept a diary while I was in prison, but I don’t go back and read it, and I have neither the time nor the desire to continue writing diaries now. I don’t have bad dreams and I don’t have flashbacks to my time in jail – luckily, I’m calm about it all. Of course, I’ve read the stories about Putin’s FSB assassins coming to the West to murder people that their boss doesn’t like. I’ve never had the sense that I’m being followed, but I understand perfectly well that if Putin gives the order to have me removed, I will be. What else can I say? I suppose that since everyone knows I am one of his most prominent personal enemies, having me killed would be a very obvious and public gesture on his part. I don’t know if that would stop him; maybe it wouldn’t – he has been pretty brazen about these things. But let’s hope that some rules of the game remain in play.

I have made an effort to use my experiences for positive ends. I redoubled my charitable activities and expanded my philanthropic organisation, Open Russia, which promotes civic values and the education of young people. Because Vladimir Putin views these values as a threat, the authorities harassed and threatened Open Russia with increasing vehemence. In the Russian presidential elections of 2018, and in all elections since, Open Russia supporters have played a big part in organising democratic opposition to the current regime.

Reunited with my parents, Marina and Boris, and my son Pavel in December 2013

A woman shows her support for me during a rally in Moscow, 2007

Through a combination of vote rigging and the repression of independent political activity, including the banning of genuine opposition candidates, Putin has continued to win his Potemkin-style elections. There is anger within Russia and, increasingly, abroad too, at the contempt with which he treats the democratic process. In November 2021, the US House of Representatives bi-partisan Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe – known as the Helsinki Commission – introduced a Congressional Resolution to end US recognition of Putin as the president of Russia, stating that any attempt by him to remain in office after the end of his current term in 2024 would be unconstitutional and illegitimate. In 2020, Putin rewrote the Russian constitution in order to abolish the legal ban on him serving yet another term as president, submitting the change to a plebiscite of voters that the Congressional Committee described as ‘the most manipulated vote in the country’s modern history’. ‘Any attempt by President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin to remain in office beyond the end of his current and final term on May 7, 2024,’ concluded the Commission, ‘shall warrant nonrecognition on the part of the United States.’ It struck a nerve. Putin’s spokesman immediately condemned the resolution as ‘aggressive meddling’ in Russia’s affairs and warned that if Congress were to endorse the Commission’s wording, it would cause ‘a rupture in relations between Russia and the United States’.