Mr Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, who is imprisoned on tax fraud charges, yesterday made an emotional attempt to recast himself as a leading political dissident, in a philosophical letter in which he blamed his wealth for his fate.

"I have realised that wealth on its own, especially vast wealth, in no way makes a person free," he wrote in the Vedomosti newspaper. "I had to close my eyes to a lot of things, and make my peace with a lot, for the sake of my wealth, to keep it and grow it. I didn't just run my property, it ran me."

The letter goes against the grain of previous missives, which were conciliatory to the Russian president. In it, he openly criticises the Kremlin for dismantling a large part of the Yukos oil empire and allowing the state to buy it up at a reduced price.

An unknown company called Baikal Finance, which turned out to be a crude front for the state, bought the production unit of Yukos, Yuganskneftegaz, for about $9.3 billion (€6.8 billion), half its estimated worth, 10 days ago.

Mr Khodorkovsky writes: "The question is what lessons the country will take from the Yukos affair, whose finale is the most destructive event for the economy in all of President Vladimir Putin's time in power."

He attacks the renewed nationalism that fuels much of the Kremlin's increase of state power.

"No true patriot would give his life for a bunch of bureaucrats who are only interested in feathering their own nests," he says.

Many believe the billionaire's presidential ambitions and criticism of Mr Putin led him to be arrested at gunpoint on a Siberian runway in October 2003.

Some Russians despise the so-called oligarchs, a handful of businessmen who acquired state assets through dubiously cheap sales in the 1990s. But the letter attempts to draw a line under Mr Khodorkovsky's time in the business elite and recast the billionaire as a modern equivalent of a Soviet political exile.

"I would like to warn the young people of today, those who will soon be in positions of power, don't be jealous of wealthy people... Wealth opens new avenues but it enslaves your creative faculties and takes over your personality," Mr Khodorkovsky says. - (Guardian Service)