A Russian Rhapsody:

Just a reminder of where Russia is heading:

On Esquire:

The Russian edition of Esquire recently published a very rare interview with the imprisoned Russian former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. This week, Khodorkovsky was placed in solitary confinement at his prison in Chita in eastern Siberia as a consequence of that interview, according to his attorneys. The interview was conducted by the popular Russian novelist Boris Akunin, and because of the highly restricted nature of Khodorkovky’s imprisonment took place by letter over several weeks.

Khodorkovsky, one of Russia’s 1990s oligarchs, was head of the large Russian oil company Yukos and one of the richest men in the world in 2004, when he was arrested and later convicted of fraud and tax evasion in what was widely regarded as a flawed trial engineered by then-president Vladimir Putin. Khodorkovky had antagonized some in the Russian leadership through his growing ties to the West and his apparent domestic political ambitions. The interview appears in the October issue of the Russian edition of Esquire, and an English-language translation has been made available here by one of Kohdorkovsky’s international attorneys, Robert Amsterdam.