The intelligentsia is always ready to write open letters on civic themes - but this is the Czech intelligentsia. On April 19 leading Prague newspapers published an open letter in support of Mikhail Khodorkovsky written by prominent political figures. The appeal was signed by twenty-six people famous all over the Czech Republic, including ex-President Vaclav Havel, the ex-ambassador to Russia Lubos Dobrovsky, deputy foreign minister Alexander Vondra, and senators Zdenek Barta, Karel Schwarzenberg and Jaromir Shtetina. The signatories were convinced, they said, that the ‘selectively sentenced’ Khodorkovsky had ended up in a prison colony ‘as a result of political puppetry’. In their view he was punished for ‘openly expressing sympathy with the Russian political opposition’ and for criticizing ‘the Kremlin’s dubious economic views’. He drew down the prosecution on himself, according to them, by becoming the opponent of a regime bent on centralizing all political, economic and judicial power.

The group put special emphasis on the circumstances surrounding Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment in the Krasnokamensk prison-colony. ‘Disciplinary punishments handed down for provoked, dubious and even non-existent violations of prison regulations are aimed solely at providing any court later to consider his parole with grounds for rejecting it because of his so-called misconduct’, they wrote.

‘Given the vested interest of the Russian authorities in depriving Khodorkovsky of his freedom, he now needs the kind of support given to political prisoners’, the statement went on; and it ended with an appeal to all those who are ‘interested in the development of democracy, legality and justice in Russia’. They should publicly express their concern over Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s fate, so that the Russian authorities would be prevented from now on from ‘violating the rights and principles which underlie European democracy’.

(Hospodarske noviny and a number of other Czech newspapers, 19.04.2006)