Boris Reitschuster, the Moscow correspondent for one of Germany’s largest circulation magazines, FOCUS, had the opportunity to visit Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s mother, Marina, who continues her son’s philanthropy work at a large orphanage they founded, despite considerable political pressures to close the institution down. The following is a translation of his article from the most recent issue of the magazine. (click here to read a 2006 interview with Marina)

Mikhail’s Orphanage

Part of the ex-oligarch Khodorkovsky’s empire was a boarding school – now being run by his mother

Boris Reitschuster
Focus, September 15, 2008, pp.156

The Kremlin took her son away and now she must take care of her other 180 children. “I am always afraid of a closure, particularly so in the summer vacation,” says Marina Khodorkovskaya. The 74 year-old retiree is Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s mother. He was once Russia’s richest man, until he challenged Vladmir Putin and landed in jail in 2003. The fallen oligarch put the children in his mother’s hands; boys and girls who had no parents or came from socially disadvantaged families live in the boarding school. Khodorkovsky founded it in 1993 in Korallovo, a good 50km northwest of Moscow, and continues to finance it despite his imprisonment. The scenes still have not left Marina Khodorkovsky’s. “It was a bit like in the war,” she remembers, as the state began its attacks on Yukos, her son’s oil company, and men suddenly entered the school in combat uniforms and Kalashnikovs.

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