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How does she now feel about his decision to remain in Russia when it was increasingly clear that Putin was becoming hostile towards him?”If he had left,” says Marina Filipovna, “all the muck-raking that has since been done of his character would still have happened, and I don’t think he could have lived with that. Morally, it’s better for him to stay here, and I understand that Speaking as a mother.. it’s more difficult. For us, there really is a question of what we are moving towards – the West, or the East.”In the coming months and years the question would be answered: Russia, and Khodorkovsky, would move East.****With a prophetic vision befitting of a character in a great Russian drama, the fears of Khodorkovsky’s mother became reality But today she remains sanguine about her son’s predicament. And then, we’ve taken a step towards Asia, which, for Russia, is synonymous with totalitarianism.

And, just before his dramatic arrest on that cold day in October 2003, he uttered some prescient words.”In Russia, in the last thousand years,” he said, “we have been taking a step towards the West And in Russia, the West and democracy are synonymous. On 2 July 2003, the same day that Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea Football Club for £140m, Platon Lebedev, a senior Yukos executive, was arrested. Lebedev is now three years into his eight-year sentence in the Kharp colony in frozen Northern Siberia. Over the rest of that tempestuous summer, other senior Yukos employees and shareholders, including Leonid Nevzlin, fled the country But not Khodorkovsky. One media tycoon, Boris Berezovsky, declared he could not live under these circumstances, and, with the threat of arrest imminent, sought asylum in London. Another, Vladimir Gusinsky, reaped the whirlwind, seeing his companies compromised and his fortune decimated.

Khodorkovsky was about to make the same mistake.Over a period of four months in 2003, Yukos, and Khodorkovsky, were systematically targeted by the state in a series of lawsuits and arrests relating to tax evasion, fraud, and murder charges. It was also frequently spoken amongst Yukos employees that Khodorkovsky saw himself as a future prime minister. And that way trouble lay.In 2000, Putin had called a meeting of Russia’s richest men, to tell them that the era of the meddling oligarchs was over. They must, he said, relinquish any interest in politics or suffer the consequences.

In return, he would turn a blind eye to the dubious means through which they had amassed their fortunes. But, in the early years of the new decade, Khodorkovsky seemed to reach a crossroads. Not only did he clean up his company, Yukos (so thoroughly that the term “yukosisation” was coined by Western investors, to mean any Russian firm that had adopted ethical and transparent operating practices), but he also threw money into philanthropic schemes He founded schools He stocked libraries. And, in Russia, to become philanthropic is to become political. Confirmation of Khodorkovsky’s growing aspirations as a politician came when he declared, albeit quietly, that he wished to “bring democracy and civil society back” to Vladimir Putin’s increasingly authoritarian Russia.At a private Kremlin meeting, he had made clear his views on a modified constitution – whereby the parliament and the Prime Minister would have more power, and the President less – to Putin. But between his ruthless, ethically questionable acquisition of great resources and riches in the near-lawless Russia of the 1990s, and his increasingly precarious public position in 2003, the single-minded pursuit of money, it would seem, had lost its lustre.In the 1990s, Khodorkovsky had a reputation for being a man with a voracious appetite for acquisitions, and a willingness to strong-arm minority shareholders out of his way.