The interview with Khodorkovsky has prompted an interest in new themes, writer Boris Akunin tells RIA Novosti

Svetlana Vovk, RIA Novosti, 24.10.2008

“I’m personally moved by the confrontation between the individual and the entire State apparatus. Moreover, I get the feeling that the State fears Khodorkovsky, but he does not fear the State. As a writer another eternal subject attracts me, the path an individual follows as a result of severe ordeals. Certain people are broken by the experience; others, it seems, are elevated,” Boris Akunin told RIA Novosti in an interview marking the fifth anniversary of imprisonment for the former head of Yukos.

The author added that if he were writing a literary work and based the plot on Khodorkovsky’s story he would give prominence to the aforementioned theme of confrontation.

Akunin was outraged and revolted, he stressed, by the consequences of their contact for Khodorkovsky. The former head of Yukos was sent to the punishment cell for 12 days after giving an interview to the writer that was published in the October issue of Esquire (Russian edition).

“It’s despicable to punish someone on the day of his parents’ golden wedding. A week had already passed since the interview appeared. Then they gave him 12 days for 12 pages. It’s also very stupid, because it provoked a wave of sympathy for Khodorkovsky that the interview in itself would not have stimulated,” noted Akunin.

The author did the interview with Khodorkovsky, he said, because he considered that it is important for society and was interesting to him personally. “Khodorkovsky promised to give frank answers to my questions and, in my view, he kept his word,” says the writer.

It was not difficult to get permission to interview Mikhail Khodorkovsky. “His lawyers are clever people and they organised it all according to strict rules that they explained to me,” said Akunin.

He did not feel it was risky for him to interview such an ambivalent figure as Khodorkovsky. “If it was 1938 I would have been shot. If it was 1978 they could have put me in a psychiatric hospital. But today we live in a different period,” he concluded.