Anna Gunin

A shocking, but also wryly humorous and ultimately uplifting memoir of an ordinary man sentenced to lengthy and brutal imprisonment in Putin’s Russia when he refused to give false evidence against Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Published originally in Russian in 2013, The Prisoner is the true story of how an ordinary man’s life was torn apart by the Kremlin. One day, Vladimir was a senior manager in Yukos, an oil and gas company based in Moscow, enjoying the good life; the next, he was plunged into the nightmarish world of Russia’s notoriously brutal prisons and penal colonies, including some in which political prisoner Alexei Navalny has been, and continues to be, held. His ’crime’ was to have refused to give false evidence against Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky. For this, Pereverzin was sentenced to a lengthy and harsh incarceration.

As Russia has adopted new laws to punish people for sharing information about its ongoing ’special operation’ in Ukraine, Vladimir’s striking memoir has become more relevant than ever.

Vladimir Pereverzin was a Yukos manager imprisoned in Russia on fraudulent charges of having embezzled ＄13 billion when he refused to give false evidence against Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He did time in some of Russia’s most notorious prisons and labour camps, including two of the penal colonies political prisoner Alexei Navalny has been held in. Vladimir now lives in Berlin and campaigns for human rights.