When we visited Khodorkovsky's trial, the one-time titan of Russian capitalism was escorted in handcuffs each morning by Kalashnikov-toting guards. The glass cage was an upgrade from his first trial, when like other Russian defendants, he sat in an actual cage with metal bars. As soon as the glass door closed each morning, Khodorkovsky would search for familiar faces. There were not many. His wife rarely comes. His business partners have fled the country. Only a handful of people not paid to be there bother to show up.

Little wonder. While the Kremlin mulls what to do with Khodorkovsky, the prosecutor was spending each day reading monotonously from 186 binders of oil contracts, accounting forms, and other documents, making no attempt to explain their relevance to the charges that Khodorkovsky led an organized criminal group that embezzled nearly 350 million tons of oil from 1998 to 2003 -- essentially the entire production of his Yukos Oil Company -- and laundered more than $24 billion of the proceeds. Even fellow prosecutors could not stifle yawns and the judge's eyes glazed over, as Khodorkovsky dutifully examined his copies, marking them with a green highlighter. The only break in the tedium came one day when Khodorkovsky complained to the judge that a guard was blocking his view.

This is what his life has come to, begging for a better vantage of his show trial. "My own fate," he wrote us one day from his glass cage, "has become a reflection of the fate of my country. That has already happened in our history before. Today, when we read Solzhenitsyn, [Varlam] Shalamov, Aleksei Tolstoy, we understand from their heroes' fates the history of our country better than from dry chronologies in school textbooks. Maybe my life will also help to understand today's Russia better -- it will become a symbol of changes."

If Khodorkovsky is right and his experience has become in a small way that of Russia's flailing democracy, then it is a story of flawed protagonists, hidden agendas, and dashed ideals.

"It's literature, absolutely," said Grigory Chkhartishvili, who, under the pseudonym Boris Akunin, is one of Russia's most successful living novelists. Although they have never met, Chkhartishvili struck up a correspondence with Khodorkovsky, seeing his case as a tale of power, money, and intrigue that puts a society on trial as much as a man. He calls it a Dreyfus Affair for Russia. "If I'd written a novel like that," he told us, "nobody would have believed it."

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