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Tom Parfitt

It's not so long since  Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky dipped his toe out of bed every morning in a luxury villa on the edge of Moscow.

Back in those golden days, an armoured saloon waited to sweep him to work down  Rublyovskoye Shosse, the 'millionaires' row' of the Russian capital.

But today the 42-year-old father-of-three and former oil   magnate wakes to a harsher existence: a bunk bed in a barracks shared with 160 other inmates at penal colony YaG  14/10, just inside the Russian border with China.

After fevered speculation about where he would serve his term, prison officials confirmed last month that Khodorkovsky had been delivered to this remote Siberian prison camp to complete his sentence on charges of fraud and tax evasion.

YaG 14/10, the place that will be his home for the next six years, stands on the edge of  Krasnokamensk, a wind-blasted town  5,000km east of Moscow, near  Manzhouli.

A scattering of tatty, grey buildings hunched on the open steppe, this is a place at the edge of civilisation. Krasnokamensk - built in the 1960s as a dormitory town for a massive uranium mine and once a closed city - is eight hours by car from the regional capital,  Chita.

Nearly two centuries have passed since Tsar Nikolai I banished the rebellious aristocrats known as the  Decembrists to remote corners of eastern Siberia. In Soviet times, enemies of the people were dispatched to similar benighted spots in the network of labour camps called the  Gulag.

Today, in President  Vladimir Putin's Russia, it seems the price of dissent comes no cheaper.

For Khodorkovsky - former billionaire owner of the  Yukos oil empire and now convicted criminal - the road to internal exile ended  in  YaG  14/10. At dawn  most days, he  dons blue fatigues and shuffles off with his fellow zeks (slang for inmates) from unit No8 to a breakfast of porridge and black tea.

In winter, temperatures drop to minus 40 degrees Celsius and bitter winds sweep across the  steppe.

Visitors are rare and the tycoon's arrival has sent a ripple of disruption through the town of 60,000, previously a  zone that was off limits to  outsiders. 'He's the biggest bird that ever flew in here,'  said a guard from the camp, who, like almost everyone here, asked not to be named.

Once Russia's richest man with a personal fortune of US$15 billion,   Khodorkovsky ran afoul of the Kremlin when he lobbied for private oil pipelines and dripped cash into parties opposed to  Mr Putin.

He was arrested two years ago  as he prepared to board his private jet on a Siberian airfield. A court found him guilty of tax evasion and massive fraud in May this year and  handed down a jail sentence of nine years,  later reduced to eight on appeal.

After two years on remand, he must spend six more behind bars,   which may yet be extended if new charges are brought.

Old habits die hard in these parts, and even to approach YaG 14/10 - known to locals as 'the zone' - prompts a warning to back off, fast.

A ramshackle collection of huts behind a wall made from wooden slats held up by slumped concrete pillars is all one can glimpse before guards bear down. An observation post provides a clear field of fire over the approach road and surrounding wasteland.

Outside, men in camouflage erected a new checkpoint last week to prevent prying eyes. But despite the air of secrecy, details began to leak out.

'There're only a few old hands left over from the days when it was a 'harsh regime' camp,' said one prison source. 'He's got nothing to worry about - they're mostly fraudsters and thieves, just like him.'

Work is optional but offers one desirable perk: a salary of up to 23.23  roubles ($6) per day. Inmates are largely in their mid-20s and are keen for a job to alleviate boredom and earn money for cigarettes and chocolate, bought in the prison shop.

'There's a kind of sewing workshop where they make uniforms for policemen and some of them get to look after cows and pigs,' said Valery Dereshov, a local reporter who went inside two years ago.

An official at the federal penitentiary service said the colony spent 65.44 roubles daily on each prisoner, of which 35 were spent on food. 'All the prisoners eat in the same canteen,' he said. 'They prepare the food themselves and they do the washing up. The bread is baked by the prisoners. On the menu today is porridge, bread, meat. Soon they will get a wagon of seafood and fish.'

The official said inmates rose at 6am, and those on duty worked for two hours, while all could watch TV for two hours a day. 'Khodorkovsky is no exception and works like all the others,' he said.

The tycoon had brought in two cases of books and was studying for an unspecified doctorate. He would sleep on a bunkbed in a dormitory 40 metres by 15 metres, in a two-floor building holding an estimated 160 prisoners.

Khodorkovsky is calm but disoriented, said  Natalia Terekhova, a Krasnokamensk lawyer who visited him at the camp. 'Mikhail Borisovich had a lot of questions about the conditions, his rights, his access to newspapers and television,' she said. 'Imagine an intellectual person finding himself for the first time in such a place. He doesn't want to lose touch with the outside world.'

The tycoon's legal team in Moscow is less restrained.  Anton Drel, his defence lawyer, accused the Kremlin of deliberately isolating  Khodorkovsky  from his family.

'This is the pursuit of a certain goal: it's vengeance,' Mr Drel said.  'The proximity of a person weakened by time in prison to a uranium mine ... could lead to a sad end.' Mr Drel said he was preparing a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights on grounds that prisoners are habitually allowed to serve their sentences close to home.

Ecologists warn that piles of tailings and giant lakes of acidic waste close to the town - byproducts from the mining process - are an environmental disaster  in the making.

But sympathy for Khodorkovsky is thin on the ground in Krasnokamensk. Few here can tolerate his supporters' claim that he's been sent to what Russians call a 'bears' corner' - a wild place in the sticks.

'That's all rubbish, we survive here and so will he,' said Gennady, 58, a geologist fixing his car in nearby  Oktyabrsky village, where tests a decade ago found  levels of radon - a gas emitted by radioactive materials - at 190  times their recommended maximum.



Billionaire's demise ends in remote Siberian penal colony