There is the guard who delivers blows with no visible traces. The fraudster stitched up by the police for murder. The abandoned teenager, the drug addict. These are some of the stories collected in Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s first book published in English by Penguin Books, My Fellow Prisoners, detailing the lives of numerous inmates he met throughout his ten-year experience imprisoned in Russia before being released last December.

The book, which was published in mid-April this year, has been receiving warm reviews in the media.

My Fellow Prisoners is book is about the choices made by people with their backs to the wall, writes Roger Boyes in the Times of London. One of the featured stories relates the experience of one prisoner who refused to testify against Khodorkovsky on a trumped up administrative violation, instead telling the disciplinary panel that a guard had given him two packs of cigarettes to lie. As a result, the prisoner was sent to solitary confinement.

“We make a deal with our conscience: we lie, keep quiet,” writes Khodorkovsky. “Is this really the right decision? Because this raises another important issue: the process of ‘negative selection’, whereby gradually only the worst people remain in the system.”

Boyes observes from the book that the “stitching up suspects” has become an integral part of the Russian criminal process, such as the grisly death in prison of the whistleblower, Sergei Magnitsky, who was later put on trial and convicted after his death.

Reviewing the book in the Financial Times, John Lloyd writes “the sketches in this new book are vivid, humane and poignant: Sergei, drug pusher and thief, who refused a deal to shorten his sentence since it involved confessing that he robbed an old woman in order to clear the case off police books; an aged convict who ‘lacked the will or readiness to fight for his own fate – so crucial if you’re to keep your head above water in today’s cruel world’; the prison investigator Yuri Ivanovich, who tries and fails to expose corruption among his colleagues.

Lloyd notes that although Khodorkovsky expresses a vision that Russia “will ultimately take the road of European civilization,” but given the recent struggles over Ukraine, this vision will take time – and “may be realised in harsher ways than he hopes.”