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Having spent the greater part of my life under a Communist dictatorship, I am very familiar with the Bolshevik mentality according to which an author in general, and an eminent author in particular, is always guilty, and must be punished accordingly.

Not all political prisoners are innocents.

I am well aware that there are prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union, including some who have said they have chosen to resist the law because of religious reasons.

I have this fringe theory that I've sort of stress-tested a little bit - the more polarising and popular a case is, the more likely an acquittal.

I just spent 11 and a half months in a maximum-security jail, got shot five times, and was wrongly convicted of a crime I didn't commit.

There was a war crimes trial because an American prisoner had been shot trying to escape. He had obviously been recaptured and shot, and that violated the Geneva Convention.

It's true I didn't get a fair trial, but the problem is people don't understand the details. It is important to understand the details of the trial and why I'm not guilty under the charges that were brought against me.

I was in prison with the assassins of the former president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, who was killed in 1981. Those who weren't executed in that case were given life sentences, and two of those were with me in prison.

A trial is a powerful vehicle to explain things. It is the most time that anybody spends really thinking about one thing. Unless you are the analyst on the National Security staff that's assigned to monitor Putin, and that's all you do, day in and day out, very few people ever spend the time on a single subject that is spent during trial.

When men are arrested without any legal basis and for political reasons, it's merely a routine, everyday occurrence in Russia, and hardly anyone has any sympathy.