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Khodorkovsky‘s revealing novel , “Meine Mitgefangenen” (“My Fellow Prisoners”) will be released within the coming days.
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Prior to the launch of his new book in German, entitled Meine Mitgefangenen (My Fellow Prisoners) Mikhail Khodorkovsky made the short journey from his new home in Geneva to the city of Berlin to take part in an event held at the Literaturhaus in the city.
During the course of the event Khodorkovsky was interviewed by Professor Wolfgang Eichwede, deputy president of the German Society on Eastern European Studies.
To an attentive audience Khodorkovsky provided insights on the more than ten years in prison, going on to explain that the conventions of Russian society and those in Russian prisons are very alike, based around corruption, which he went on to describe as “the supporting pillar of the Russian system but will eventually lead to an economic disaster.”
Khodorkovsky wound up the question and answer session by stating that the Russian people “have to act and must not wait for a rescue from outside before thanking the audience made up of around one hundred guests from the world of politics, literature and media, among them Nobel literature laureate and former German Foreign Minister Markus Meckel for their interest in a promoting a just and democratic Russia.
During the course of the evening, selected chapters from Khodorkovsky’s book were read by renowned and award winning actor Ulrich Noethen.
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“Meine Mitgefangene” will be published by German publishing house Galiani. The novel is based around 21 short stories in which Khodorkovsky relates his experiences of meeting a number of prisoners he encountered during the more than ten years that he spent in various prisons around Russia.
Some of these often disturbing stories were published in the Russian language magazine “The New Times” from August 2011 while Khodorkovsky was still incarcerated, with the German Sunday newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung” also taking them up, after having them translated into German, to the great interest of the public.
In 2004, Khodorkovsky was the wealthiest man in Russia and one of the richest people in the world, ranked 16th on Forbes list of billionaires.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky sprang to prominence in the business world as a Moscow student under Mikhail Gorbachev’s heady days of glasnost and perestroika during the Nineteen Nineties.
While only in his thirties Khodorkovsky succeeded in established a number of successful industrial concerns from the privatization of former state assets under the umbrella of his holding company Yukos , particularly based around the development of oil fields in Siberia, under the free hand of Putin’s predecessor Boris Yeltsin.
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