Letter from Mikhail Khodorkovsky – addressed not to me but to everybody. Newspapers have already closed for the New Year holiday, and M.B. asked me to post the text here, on my blog. This is exactly what I’m doing, with pleasure. – from author Boris Akunin’s LiveJournal blog.

As for many people in the world, the New Year holidays have been my favourites since childhood. The decorated tree, the presents, the fireworks – a winter wonder. At first its creators were grandfather and grandmother, my father and mother. Then everything changed in a natural way – I became a father, and subsequently a grandfather. And the meaning of the holiday changed as well – now it is when you yourself can make the wonder, and rejoice at the joy of others, feeling yourself a miniscule little part of the hand of a kind God.

I have been very fortunate – I have never been alone: beloved family, friends, a multitude of people, familiar and completely unknown, have supported me in difficult moments.

But it so happened that I have been given the opportunity to look at life from its “seamy side” as well. In jail and before it, in heavy years, I carried out the conviction that it is not even poverty itself that is more frightening, but loneliness. Especially – the loneliness of children and old people.

I have had the opportunity to visit children’s homes and homes for the elderly. They are not all the same, and not all of them are full of miserable people, but that which we call “customary” or “social”, there, where they house the sick and the abandoned – is a macabre trial for the nerves of a normal person.

I am not able to find a rational explanation for how such a thing is possible in our already far from poor country. I am not able to explain why money is excruciatingly collected “penny by penny” for medical treatment of children who can be cured. I can not explain how our political elite, having adopted an odious budget that does not guarantee life, health and adequate care even for them, is now, out of some political objectives, depriving children of the hope of finding a family. When such a thing takes place, it is difficult to avoid feeling a heavy, grim loathing…

But what is more important for those who are now alone and miserable is our love, our ability to make even a small wonder for them.

Lonely old people and lonely children. Give them a thought. The ability and the readiness to be kind and compassionate – these are real “fasteners” for holding together our society, which we have not yet become, but which we want to be.

Happiness to you all in the New Year.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky