This prison notebook could slip easily through the narrowest bars. Into a slim volume, the recently released oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky smuggles broad meditations on Russian justice after his near-decade of incarceration. He describes the wheels of corrupt administration in which many of the jailed function as innocent ball bearings. Short chapters bear stark titles: The Witness, The Grass, The Thief, The Addict. Each describes victims of circumstance sucked into criminal landscapes. The former oil billionaire who fell foul of Putin gives accounts of bureaucratic bullies, of prisoners serving years because the embezzlement of superiors was pinned on them. Across his case studies he talks of justice’s “negative selection” – how honourable people get out of the legal system and leave behind “Idiots and lowlife – great material for building up the material of the state.” Of all of Khodorkovsky’s stark truths, the most piercing is this: one in 10 male Russians spends time behind bars. This tragedy is the hardest to escape.
