'As a Russian citizen I am proud of him. As a mother, I have mixed feelings'

On the first anniversary of the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian billionaire, his parents talk exclusively to Tom Parfitt about the family's ordeal.

A startling sight awaits visitors to the home of Boris and Marina Khodorkovsky. On top of a television stands a signed portrait of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, who ordered the arrest of their beloved son.

"We keep it there to remind us who started all this," says Mr Khodorkovsky, 75, with a bitter laugh.

"All this" began a year ago tomorrow, on October 25, 2003, when the couple's only child, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, was seized in a dramatic raid by armed police as his private jet refuelled at a Siberian airport.

A black hood was pulled over his head and he was hauled back to Moscow to be formally charged with seven counts of tax evasion, falsifying documents and "theft by fraud on a large scale". The tycoon was incarcerated and his trial began in June.

In the past year, the Khodorkovskys have seen their son's reputation and business demolished, as the Kremlin launched one salvo after another at him and his beleaguered oil company, Yukos. His trial - which formally relates to the privatisation of an obscure fertiliser company in the mid 1990s - resumes tomorrow and is expected to drag on for several weeks or months.

At the same time, the justice ministry is preparing to auction off part of Yukos's core production unit, Yuganskneftegaz, at a knock-down price, to recover billions of dollars of allegedly unpaid taxes.

The Khodorkovskys have no doubt who is to blame for their son's prosecution. "Our generation has a genetic fear about people from that organisation with three letters in its name [the KGB]," said Mrs Khodorkovsky, 73, a small, neat woman. "And Putin is one of them. He did it, although he wouldn't have dared to do it alone."

President Putin, a former colonel in the KGB, made it clear soon after he came to power in 2000 that he would not tolerate Russia's super-rich oligarchs encroaching on his power. Mr Khodorkovsky, it seemed, overstepped the mark by funding anti-Kremlin parties and talking openly about the country's problems. "Mikhail was not going to lick any boots," says his mother. "He's a very independent person.

"He talked frankly about corruption and the president didn't like that. And somebody told Putin that he wanted his place - which wasn't true, of course, but he believed it."

In the late 1990s and the early years of the new century, Yukos - which faces having its most valued oilfield sold off by the government at an artificially low price next month - went from strength to strength. Western advisers were drafted in and Yukos won plaudits for its modern approach to business.

As Mr Khodorkovsky amassed a fortune of $8 billion, (£4.3 billion) his parents sensed that something could go terribly wrong. For his 40th birthday last year, his mother wrote him a poem that included the line: "For now the luck follows you and the money rains on you. But it could all be different."

"Misha thought we were moving towards a democracy," says Mr Khodorkovsky, using his son's nickname. "We believed it too. But then we realised he had gone too far and we told him to stop. In this country nobody likes a successful person, and the policy of the state supports that.

"As a citizen, I'm proud of him," says Mrs Khodorkovsky. "As a mother I have mixed feelings" Her voice trails away. "Sometimes I think he should have left the country, got out earlier."

Even before his arrest, Mr Khodorkovsky was an unassuming man. Unlike others among Russia's new elite, he eschewed many of the trappings of wealth.

However, his way of life was a matter of envy to many Russians: he drove a black Mercedes SUV with tinted windows, and lived with his family in a compound of luxury houses among pine trees in Zhukova, an elite suburb west of Moscow.

Now, between appearances in court, he languishes in a prison cell which he shares with two other inmates. The prisoners are fed on black bread, porridge and thin fish soup. However, says his mother: "He's a fighter. He doesn't complain."

"He's got a lot of free time," says his father with a wry smile. "So he spends it thinking, looking back on his life, trying to work out what stupidity might have got him into this situation. But can't find an answer."

His mother joked: "It's the first time he's had enough sleep in 15 years. You know, even before he was arrested people used to whine about his millions and billions. They never said anything about all the sacrifices and efforts he made to get where he was. He's a hard worker."

Like other inmates' families, the couple can only talk to their son for one hour a month. First they have to wait, sometimes for several hours, in a cold room with no lavatories, before they are allowed into the private meeting area. "It's a tiny room with a thick sheet of glass between us and telephones to talk to each other," said Mrs Khodorkovsky. "You can't touch him - you just put your hand up to the glass, that's all."

Mostly they talk about their son's charity work and his family. "What else can you talk about when your every word is being listened to and recorded?" said his mother. The oligarch has three children with his second wife, Inna, who lives in Moscow: five-year-old twin sons Ilya and Gleb and daughter Anastasiya, 14. His eldest son Pavel, 19, from his first marriage, lives abroad.

Mr Khodorkovsky's parents say they, and the rest of the family, are "bearing up" under the strain of separation. The couple won admiration when they turned up at their son's trial hearings and joined the elbowing crowds trying to get into the courtroom. "We try to look like everything is OK," said Mrs Khodorkovsky. "We get dressed up, we go to the court. I put on my makeup, I smile, I try to look strong. So does Misha's wife."

"It's different when you get home," says Mr Khodorkovsky, drawing deeply on a cigarette. "Somebody gave us a toy, a little dog that lets out a pitiful whine when you switch a button. When people come to visit and ask us how we feel I just turn it on and it howls. 'That's how we feel,' I say."

As for the future, that remains unclear. "Who knows what will happen," says his mother, who has previously expressed fears that her son will get the maximum sentence - 10 years in a labour camp.

An ordinary Jewish family, the Khodorkovskys lived a modest life in the Soviet period, squeezed into a single bedroom flat. They both worked for more than 30 years as engineers at the precision tool-making factory.

In an interview shortly before his arrest last year their son remembered: "My parents were Muscovites I went to this pre-school that shared a fence with the factory, and we would always climb the fence with the intent of pocketing some interesting metal things for ourselves." The young Mikhail Khodorkovsky idolised his parents and wanted to pursue a similar career.

He enrolled at the Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology and quickly became deputy head of its branch of the Communist youth organisation, the Komsomol. The position was a springboard for Mr Khodorkovsky who graduated in 1986, at the age of 23, a year after Mikhail Gorbachev took power in the Kremlin. He set up a youth organisation that sold its scientific expertise to research institutes. Later he discovered a hugely lucrative loophole that allowed him to turn worthless accounting units paid as subsidies into hard currency. Much of it was murky, but it was a foundation for the establishment of his bank Menatep. And in 1995, he bought Yukos at a rock bottom price in a disputed auction.

"He's not ambitious really," says his mother. "He just always believed in 'I can'." The couple remain adamant that their son is innocent of all the charges made against him.

"What we gave him is our care for people," his father stressed. "I lost my father in the war and my mother was working all hours. I had to feed the family, help my little sister. So I went out begging and looking through rubbish bins. That's why I've always wanted to help people, especially children. And so does he."

Last month, Mr Khodorkovsky released a statement via his lawyers saying he hoped to concentrate on charity work after his release.

Boris and Marina Khodorkovsky were talking to The Sunday Telegraph in the office of their home at the 19th century Koralovo estate owned by Yukos, west of Moscow, where they have lived for the past decade. Also in the 250-acre grounds is the Podmoskovny Lyceum for disadvantaged children, a 160-pupil boarding school funded by the oil company and one of their son's favourite projects.

Yesterday, pupils at its immaculate, modern premises were celebrating its tenth anniversary. Surrounded by forests, the school seemed a world away from intrigues about the Kremlin persecuting Russia's richest man. "I don't think Mikhail Borisovich did anything bad," said one pupil, Ana Dorofeeva, 12, sitting below a poster of a smiling Mr Khodordovsky in a suit and rollneck jumper. "One person told me that Yukos was getting in somebody's way. But I don't know who it was upsetting."

The rest of Russia does know, however.

(From The Telegraph, 23.10.2004)