and appeals to President Medvedev through the pages of Novaya gazeta.

Zoya Yeroshok, Novaya gazeta, 17.07.2008

The process begins in Moscow. To get permission to visit her son Marina Khodorkovsky must submit a written request. Formerly this was made to the prosecutor’s office. Since autumn last year it is made to the Investigative Committee.

It is a bureaucratic procedure. Khodorkovsky’s mother tells me that everything “is done according to the rules”, precisely, without delay; five days later, when the answer is ready, they phone her up. Either her husband Boris or the defence lawyers go and pick up the document. Once she has that in her hands then she can fly to Chita. Khodorkovsky’s parents take it in turns to visit him but more often Marina makes the trip since Boris has many daily, even hourly, duties to perform at the Lyceum, the boarding school they run at Koralovo, outside Moscow. If it is a direct flight to Chita, it takes six and a half hours.

Marina Philippovna used to stay at a hotel in the Siberian city but now she uses the flat rented for her son’s attorneys. The hotel wasn’t bad but she found the uncertain water supply there something of a trial. For instance, she flew into Chita in the summer and it was a baking 40 degrees centigrade but the hotel had neither hot nor cold running water.

As soon as she arrives her son’s lawyer takes the written permission to visit to the prison. It is located on the city outskirts and much like any other prison. Of Chita she says, “It’s a rather neglected city,” and we remember when we were together in Krasnokamensk. Her son was in the penal colony nearby and we liked the small town, which was clean, tidy and cared-for.

At the prison they name a time for the visit. For instance, come tomorrow at 1.40 pm. Marina Khodorkovsky must be at the entrance at exactly 1.40 pm. Two visits a month are allowed at the Chita jail, it may be one for the wife and one for the parents or two for one of them (it makes no difference), but they are for exactly three hours and the clock starts ticking as soon as Marina Khodorkovsky has surrendered her passport [ID document] to the entrance guards. Then she and the escort walk very fast, at a trot even so as not to waste valuable minutes, to the director of the pre-trial detention centre. To be more precise, they go to his secretary who writes out a pass and then, again at a brisk trot, they cross the prison grounds, passing through several buildings and up a number of steep staircases to a room where Khodorkovsky’s mother is searched. Only then do they reach the meetings room. She has no complaints, everyone is helpful and keeps to the rules, she says.

But everything has to fit into that three hours, the instructions describe it as “three hours including access”, and that includes these hasty marches through the prison. In order not to waste precious time, for example, Marina Khodorkovsky tries to dress lightly even in the winter. Laughing, she tells me:

“Sometimes I very much want to call at one of the churches in Chita but I can’t: it’s either wear trousers or go to church. They frown on women in trousers at the church but I can go up and down the prison stairs faster in trousers than in a skirt. I don’t want to take much with me on the trip so as to not to hand in luggage at the airport. The temperature in the winter time can fall to minus 40 degrees centigrade, and even lower, but if it’s a choice between a fur coat and a light overcoat then I take the overcoat.”

She is searched by a female guard. They are always “tactful and polite”, says Marina Philippovna. That is the woman, through and through. In the most dramatic moments, she always makes a point of noting someone’s good manners and tact, whether they are a guard, a jailer or anyone. Frequently I’ve heard her say, “People are the same everywhere.” She always takes only three things on here visits with her son Mikhail. Her glasses, Validol and a handkerchief. Books, photographs or letters are not allowed. Thus prepared, Marina Khodorkovsky enters the meetings room.

It’s a small, ordinary room. A table and several chairs. “Is the furniture new?” I ask. “No, and it’s all firmly screwed to the floor.” First she and her guard enter the room. Then Mikhail Khodorkovsky is brought in. The meeting is not held in privacy, of cause. The guard (or overseer?) stays with them. Mother and son sit down at the table.

She can’t hold Misha’s hand. What they can and can’t discuss she knows by heart. She does not break the rules and talks only of what is permitted. “We talk about home, about the school. Mikhail is always interested in the school. He asks in detail and, as if it is a special subject, how the pupils are doing, who has got a place at which institute and often he repeats that the most important thing is that they should ‘grow up to be decent people’. We also discuss what the papers and TV are saying. If it has been printed or broadcast then it’s a permitted subject for conversation. We talk and talk and, believe me, our conversations aren’t sad. Often we laugh, and amuse one another. When I reprimanded him he was ready to put his side when we met. After his hunger strike [in solidarity with Vasily Aleksanyan] he had lost weight, was pale and he had more grey hairs. Now he’s not bad, he looks okay, is in good spirits and complains about nothing. But then he never has complained, about anything or anyone.”

For two years now Marina Khodorkovsky has gone to visit her son in Chita on his birthday, 26 June. It’s a present they give one another. Chita is the third place Mikhail has been imprisoned. First was the Matrosskaya Tishina prison in Moscow, then the penal colony in Krasnokamensk and now, since 2006, Chita. We try to calculate how many times she has visited her son over the past five years. He spent two years in the Matrosskaya Tishina remand centre in Moscow. They were allowed a visit a month but sometimes visits by his wife Inna, at other times by his parents, were cancelled especially when the trial started, so it is hard to establish the total. With Krasnokamensk and Chita, however, the air tickets confirmed that she has been to see her son about ten times. Not very often for a period of three years.

When they meet he always asks, ‘No one says hurtful things to you or bothers you?’ Or he tells his parents, “Wait for me, I want you all there,” or “Take care nothing happens to you. That would make things much harder for me.” He always asks how his mother passes her day. She says that each day she always talks with his lawyers, she tells me, and deals with “school business”. For those who don’t know the pupils at the Lyceum are orphans or have been taken away from their parents, some were left all alone after the Nord Ost theatre siege in Moscow or the Beslan school siege in Ingushetia or they are the children, as one person put it, of “defeated adults”.

Marina Philippovna is the school grandmother. It’s a definite and very important job in itself. She knows all about the children, when they were sick, how many sweethearts they’ve had (and who they are), when they are taking entrance exams to higher education institutes. Day and night she and her husband Boris think how to feed, shoe and clothe their 180 charges; whether to let them watch the Internet or not, to go into Moscow alone; what to do if some boy starts smoking on the sly; and, most important of all, how to give them some joy in life after losing their parents.

Filling those empty, dull eyes is their chief concern. The children begin to recover and a boy who has not smiled for a year suddenly laughs. He laughs and around him all start shedding tears: the teachers, the cooks, everyone, and news spreads through the school, “Lyosha laughed! Lyosha laughed!” Then he was eleven years old. Today he has graduated from the Oil and Gas Institute and is an impressive young man. And that’s just one episode among many.

Marina Khodorkovsky is the school grandmother but she is also a mother and whenever anyone asks her about her son she replies with inimitable dignity: “As a Russian citizen I am proud of Misha. As his mother I fear for him every day.” And she is a wife as well. She loves her husband and he loves her, you can tell that from the first moment you see them together. And they have been together, she tells me with a smile … “This autumn is our fiftieth anniversary.”

Still smiling she asks whether she can appeal to President Medvedev through our newspaper. With a smile on her face she says:

“Dear Dmitry Anatolevich,

This autumn my husband and I will celebrate our golden wedding anniversary. Please, see your way to giving us the best of presents, that our son will be sitting at the table with us at home that day.”

Boris and Marina Khodorkovsky married on 9 October 1958.