Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Like a forgotten ghost blown into town on a blast of Siberian wind, fallen oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky appeared in a Moscow courtroom Tuesday to answer new charges of embezzlement and money laundering. Once the wealthiest man in Russia, Khodorkovsky has served about half of an eight-year sentence at a Siberian prison camp near the Chinese border. His former company, the once-massive Yukos oil, was dismantled and sold at auction.

Already imprisoned for nearly eight years, the inmate who once was Russia's richest man must still see at least 1,800 more sunrises from behind his barracks window, his view of the real world beyond the camp fence with barbed wire on top. But armed with a pen and pencil, Mikhail Khodorkovsky is following in a grand, if grim, Russian literary tradition: writing about his life in a gulag-style camp he has described as "an anti-world" where "lying is...

History is full of men who came to understand the error of their ways within the confines of a prison cell. To that number can perhaps be added Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oil tycoon who has resided in the Matrosskaya Tishina detention center for the last five months, awaiting trial on fraud and tax-evasion charges.

One of Russia's wealthiest men on Thursday abruptly quit as leader of a party casting itself as a challenger to the Kremlin's stranglehold on politics, suggesting to supporters that a feared power broker had orchestrated a takeover because the party was becoming too independent. The decision several months ago by Mikhail Prokhorov, a businessman who owns the New Jersey Nets basketball team, to try to revive the moribund Right Cause party had been controversial from the start. Prokhorov has decried the lack of alternatives to the governing party.

It has been called Russia's trial of the century, and if it keeps going at this rate, it just might last that long. On May 16, judges began reading their verdict in the case of billionaire businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose trial on fraud and tax evasion charges has become a widely discussed barometer of Russia's commitment to private business and political freedoms. The jurists have been reading ever since. Rarely has an event so closely watched and politically charged been so boring.

An imprisoned business tycoon whose legal troubles have come to symbolize the limits of political freedom in Vladimir Putin's Russia was found guilty Monday of stealing oil from his own company and is likely to face another decade behind bars. Inside a Moscow courtroom, Judge Viktor Danilkin began reading the lengthy verdict against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his partner, Platon Lebedev, in a rapid, almost inaudible monotone, not even pausing to look up. On the snowy street outside, several hundred supporters held portraits of the 47-year-old Khodorkovsky and demanded that he be freed.

The prosecutors rear out like gargoyles from the walls overhead, fingers jabbing into the air. The massive cartoon faces of witnesses, lawyers and defendants crowd the walls, words popping in balloons from their lips. "Stand up!" commands a voice as visitors climb the stairs to the exhibition, invoking the opening moments of a trial. "The judge is coming." In a gutted perfume bottle factory on a nondescript street in downtown Moscow, an exhibit opening Friday paints a fantastic, caricatured dreamscape of the continuing trial of former oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Already imprisoned for nearly eight years, the inmate who once was Russia's richest man must still see at least 1,800 more sunrises from behind his barracks window, his view of the real world beyond the camp fence with barbed wire on top. But armed with a pen and pencil, Mikhail Khodorkovsky is following in a grand, if grim, Russian literary tradition: writing about his life in a gulag-style camp he has described as "an anti-world" where "lying is...

The Russian judge who found former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky guilty of embezzlement in late December read a verdict written by superiors after they had rejected his own version, an aide disclosed Monday. Moscow City Court officials did not approve of the wording in the initial verdict drafted by Judge Viktor Danilkin, who presided over the case, and gave him a different version to read in court, Natalia Vasilyeva, a spokeswoman for Moscow Khamovnichesky Court, said in an interview with Vedomosti, a business daily.

A court rejected former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky's appeal of his conviction on fraud and tax evasion charges but cut his nine-year sentence to eight. Khodorkovsky, 42, denounced the Kremlin, and his lawyers vowed to fight on. The court's decision ended Khodorkovsky's plan to run for parliament, because Russian law bars convicts from seeking office.

In a country whose most famous billionaire-slash-politician has languished for years in prison camps, it might seem rash for another tycoon to publicly vow to break the ruling party's monopoly on power and ill conceal his presidential ambitions. But Mikhail Prokhorov, one of the richest men in Russia, not to mention the owner of the New Jersey Nets, didn't seem haunted by the specter of Mikhail Khodorkovsky when he declared this year that he was abandoning big business to head the comatose Right Cause party and released a party manifesto calling the state "hostile to its own people.

The Russian judge who found former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky guilty of embezzlement in late December read a verdict written by superiors after they had rejected his own version, an aide disclosed Monday. Moscow City Court officials did not approve of the wording in the initial verdict drafted by Judge Viktor Danilkin, who presided over the case, and gave him a different version to read in court, Natalia Vasilyeva, a spokeswoman for Moscow Khamovnichesky Court, said in an interview with Vedomosti, a business daily.

A former tycoon who challenged the rule of Russian leader Vladimir Putin was sentenced to remain in prison until at least 2017 after his conviction this week on embezzlement and money-laundering charges in a politically charged case widely condemned in the West. Judge Viktor Danilkin sentenced Mikhail Khodorkovsky to 14 years in prison to be served concurrently with a previous eight-year term that he was soon to complete. It was not immediately clear when Khodorkovsky would gain his freedom: The judge implied that the new term would keep him behind bars until 2020, but his defense team said the term would be calculated to start with his arrest in 2003.

An imprisoned business tycoon whose legal troubles have come to symbolize the limits of political freedom in Vladimir Putin's Russia was found guilty Monday of stealing oil from his own company and is likely to face another decade behind bars. Inside a Moscow courtroom, Judge Viktor Danilkin began reading the lengthy verdict against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his partner, Platon Lebedev, in a rapid, almost inaudible monotone, not even pausing to look up. On the snowy street outside, several hundred supporters held portraits of the 47-year-old Khodorkovsky and demanded that he be freed.

The prosecutors rear out like gargoyles from the walls overhead, fingers jabbing into the air. The massive cartoon faces of witnesses, lawyers and defendants crowd the walls, words popping in balloons from their lips. "Stand up!" commands a voice as visitors climb the stairs to the exhibition, invoking the opening moments of a trial. "The judge is coming." In a gutted perfume bottle factory on a nondescript street in downtown Moscow, an exhibit opening Friday paints a fantastic, caricatured dreamscape of the continuing trial of former oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Like a forgotten ghost blown into town on a blast of Siberian wind, fallen oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky appeared in a Moscow courtroom Tuesday to answer new charges of embezzlement and money laundering. Once the wealthiest man in Russia, Khodorkovsky has served about half of an eight-year sentence at a Siberian prison camp near the Chinese border. His former company, the once-massive Yukos oil, was dismantled and sold at auction.

Russian oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky pleaded not guilty to charges including fraud and tax evasion. Co-defendant Platon Lebedev, another key shareholder in oil giant Yukos, also entered a plea of not guilty. The two men face 11 charges and up to 10 years in prison. The case coincides with an inquiry into Yukos, which may face bankruptcy if it can't pay tax arrears of billions of dollars.

After more than seven months behind bars, Russia's richest man appeared in a Moscow court for the first substantive hearing in a tax evasion and fraud case widely seen as a Kremlin-orchestrated campaign to punish him. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former chief executive of Yukos Oil, was led into court under tight security. Judge Irina Kolesnikova postponed the hearing until June 8 to give tax inspectors more time to study the case.

Money laundering and embezzlement charges filed Monday against Russian oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky make it unlikely the prominent political enemy of President Vladimir V. Putin will be released from prison before the 2008 presidential election. Khodorkovsky's conviction in 2005 on tax evasion and fraud charges, viewed by many analysts as retribution for supporting political opposition figures, resulted in an eight-year prison sentence.

Russian prosecutors said Wednesday that Leonid Nevzlin, a former top manager of the Yukos business empire, may have ordered the poisoning of former Russian KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko. "A version is being looked at that those who ordered these crimes could be the same people who are on an international wanted list for serious and very serious crimes, one of whom is ... Leonid Nevzlin," the Russian prosecutor general's office said in a statement posted on its website, www.genproc.gov.ru.