Khodorkovsky is 46, but he now looks much older, a short, gaunt man with graying stubble where hair used to be. The man in the glass cage is no longer the commanding figure we knew in Moscow as bureau chiefs for the Washington Post at the beginning of the Putin era. Those were the years when Putin was launching his campaign to consolidate power, taking over independent television, driving opposition parties out of parliament, eliminating the election of governors, and forcing oligarchs who defied him to flee the country. Khodorkovsky was the one who refused to go.

The son of chemical engineers, he grew up as part of the old system, a leader of Komsomol, the Communist Party's youth league, with aspirations to run a factory. His father, Boris, was an admirer of Stalin ("Later, it turned out he was such a son of a bitch," Boris told us ruefully), and though his mother, Marina, was skeptical, she did not disabuse her son. "He was a believer," she told us. "He had Lenin's portrait and a red flag above his desk." It was not until much later that he saw things differently. Khodorkovsky told Ulitskaya that reading Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich changed his life. "I was shaken," he wrote. "I despised Stalin as having tarnished the party's cause in the interest of the cult of his own personality."

If he was a product of the system, young Misha nonetheless had a rebellious streak growing up in Moscow. Family and friends are full of stories of clashes with authority figures. "He constantly argued with us," Boris remembered. "I wanted to beat him up so much. But you can't do that with children." Nadezhda Zlobina, a friend since third grade, recalled Misha standing up to a chemistry teacher and taking over the class. "He was never afraid of arguing with teachers," she told us. "So he said something to Putin -- it didn't surprise me because he was never afraid of speaking up."

Yet Khodorkovsky was no Solzhenitsyn. He may have been headstrong, but what he cared about most was acquiring money and power. With the advent of perestroika, he experimented with get-rich-quick schemes. In 1988, he started his own bank, Menatep, and became a conduit of government money to state enterprises, pocketing huge profits by holding dollars in an era of massive ruble inflation. By age 30, he was buying state assets through manipulated auctions. He acquired control of Yukos, then the country's second-largest oil producer, for a paltry $309 million in a 1995 auction run, conveniently enough, by his own Menatep bank.

He made plenty of enemies, forcing foreign creditors to write off debt by threatening to take them to Russia's corrupt courts and cheating investors by issuing new shares to dilute their stock. "In the early years, he was playing games," said Sarah Carey, an American attorney who later served on the Yukos board. "I don't think they were illegal, most of them, because the laws were so incomplete."

But by 2001, Khodorkovsky dreamed of playing on the international stage and declared himself to be cleaning up his act. He plowed some profits back into the company, improved technology, recruited Western executives, and adopted Western accounting practices, doubling the company's output and transforming it into Russia's largest oil producer on the verge of a $45 billion merger. "He was doing a first-rate job," Carey said. "The company wasn't perfect, but no company was. They were openly and energetically moving in the right direction."

Khodorkovsky was also becoming a bigger force in Russian society, promoting Western-style democracy and the rule of law. He formed a charity called Open Russia and doled out tens of millions of dollars to human rights groups, foundations, and political parties critical of the Kremlin; he also assiduously cultivated contacts in Washington and other Western capitals while negotiating with international oil giants about possible mergers. He reasoned he was living three generations of Rockefellers in one life -- from robber baron to pillar of business to philanthropist. We went to see him in his wood-paneled Moscow office during this makeover and asked if it was about rehabilitating his image. No, he said. "This is more for the soul."

Perhaps, but Khodorkovsky's soul was competing with his ego. When Putin came to office, he told the oligarchs they could keep gains from the shady 1990s as long as they did not challenge his rule. Khodorkovsky did not listen. He aspired to control much of parliament, and some allies were even told he harbored ambitions to become prime minister, though he denies that. In a new memoir, Lord John Browne, the former chief executive of BP, recalled listening to Khodorkovsky boast of his influence over parliament and being struck by the hubris. Then he recalled Putin telling him, "I have eaten more dirt than I need to from that man." At a climactic Kremlin meeting, Khodorkovsky lectured Putin about corruption in a state privatization deal. "Putin just exploded," a top advisor told us. Five months later, Khodorkovsky's business partner, Platon Lebedev, was arrested, and Khodorkovsky was warned to leave the country. He refused. "The West accepted him," said Aleksei Kondaurov, a former top Yukos executive. "So I think all that made him overestimate his security."

In October 2003, armed, masked agents of the FSB, the KGB's successor, stormed onto Khodorkovsky's private plane on the tarmac in Novosibirsk and arrested him. He was eventually sentenced to eight years in prison for fraud and tax evasion, and the state seized much of Yukos in what even Putin's economic advisor called "the scam of the year."

The episode dispelled illusions in the West. "We'd all met him," Condoleezza Rice, who was U.S. President George W. Bush's national security advisor at the time, told us recently. "Everybody was kind of surprised by the harshness of it. We had all advocated on behalf of Khodorkovsky." Bush would no longer see Putin the same way. "Looking back now," Rice said, "it's definitely clear just what a watershed moment it really was."

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