Last Tuesday, in a Moscow courtroom, Mikhail Khodorkovsky—former oil magnate and the once the wealthiest man in Russia—delivered a remarkable speech. Khodorkovsky has been in prison since 2003 and he now faces additional charges that could force him to stay in jail for many more years. In his speech, Khodorkovsky offers a narrative of how any semblance of liberal government was snuffed out in Russia during recent years—and explains how his own fate has become part of this depressing story. The speech is an eloquent paean to democratic values from a place where those values are increasingly forgotten. We reprint it here.

I can recall October 2003. My last day as a free man. Several weeks after my arrest, I was informed that President Putin had decided: I was going to have to "slurp gruel" for eight years. It was had to believe that back then.

Judging by the prosecutors’ presentation: “give them 14 years” and “spit on previous court decisions”, over these years they have begun to fear me more, and to respect the law even less.

The first time around, they at least went through the effort of first repealing the judicial acts that stood in their way. Now they’ll just leave them be; especially since they would need to repeal not two, but more than 60 decisions.

I do not want to return to the legal side of the case at this time. Everybody who wanted to understand something has long since understood everything. Nobody is seriously waiting for an admission of guilt from me. It is hardly likely that somebody today would believe me if I were to say that I really did steal all the oil produced by my company.