Inna Khodorkovskaya said that far from being shattered by his incarceration in a remote Siberian prison colony, he is determined to dedicate his life to securing political reform.

“Of course he’ll do politics when he comes out,” said Khodorkovskaya in her first interview with a western newspaper. “That’s the way he is. He wants to change this society, that’s for sure. And just by being there in jail, with his presence alone, he is already changing it. You’ll see.

“He is not broken. On the contrary he’s even stronger. He is very focused and is in it for the long haul. Support for him is growing and will continue to grow as people understand that he is different from other so-called oligarchs. People in Russia are starting to wake up.”

Her comments coincided with a 12-year plan to modernise Russia that her husband unveiled last Friday in the opposition paper Kommersant. It calls for measures to curb corruption and create a “paternalistic” government that would aim to treble gross domestic product, boost the population by nearly 80m and create new armed forces.

In full-page newspaper advertisements the previous week, Khodorkovsky demanded a new breed of officials, “those interested in the fate of the country and its people, not their own unbridled personal enrichment”. “The country needs a new political elite — heroes, not mediocrity,” he added.

Khodorkovskaya, 36, spoke out after seeing her 42-year-old husband for the first time in the prison colony where he is expected to remain until 2011.

After his arrest in 2003 Khodorkovsky, who built a personal fortune of £4.5 billion, was held in an overcrowded Moscow jail for two years.

In a campaign orchestrated by the Kremlin, he was stripped of Yukos, his oil company, and much of his fortune.

Last month he was sent more than 3,000 miles east of Moscow by train to penal colony YaG 14/10, in Krasnokamensk, a uranium-polluted area of Siberia. For 10 days his wife and children had no idea where he was.

“I read in the press that he had been sent as far away as possible but I hoped it wasn’t true,” said Khodorkovskaya, who once worked for her him as an accountant.

“My heart was racing when I received the letter from the prison authorities stating where he was. Until the very end I hoped the papers were wrong and that he’d been sent closer to home. They dispatched him so far away because they want to isolate him. They want people to forget about him.”

A few days later she set off on her own arduous journey to Krasnokamensk — six hours by plane and 10 hours by car across Siberia’s desolate steppes. The colony, where more than 1,000 inmates are serving sentences for theft and fraud, opened in the 1960s when prisoners were used to build one of the Soviet Union’s largest uranium processing plants.

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