Father Sergei Taratukhin, 49, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, 42, trod very different paths through the death throes of the Soviet Union and the birth of a new Russian state. But yesterday these two victims of Russia’s turbulent politics came face to face in the unlikely setting of the YaG-14/10 penal colony in Krasnokamensk, a uranium mining town in eastern Siberia.

Father Sergei, the prison’s priest, met Khodorkovsky, its newest inmate, for the first time since he was transferred from Moscow on October 15 to serve out his sentence. As the two men talked for 20 minutes, an instant bond was formed between the priest imprisoned for challenging the Kremlin in 1974 and the oil tycoon jailed for the same in President Putin’s Russia.

“When I was in the prison camp, the KGB men used to say they dreamt of a day when political prisoners would be treated like ordinary criminals,” Father Sergei told The Times. “Now their dream has come true.”

His was a lone sympathetic voice in Krasnokamensk, a town of 65,000 people built in the 1960s near the Russian border with China and Mongolia. This dusty settlement of wooden cottages and concrete high-rises was a closed military town in Soviet times, and most residents despise the oligarchs who profited from the Union’s collapse.

Khodorkovsky accused the Kremlin this week of trying to break his spirit by sending him here rather than to a prison near his home in Moscow or the court where he was convicted, as is the norm. “The Kremlin has tried to isolate me completely from the country and the people, and, what is more, they have tried to destroy me physically,” he said in a statement.

“They hope that Khodorkovsky will soon be forgotten,” he said. “They are trying to convince you, friends, that the fight is over. That you must resign yourselves to domination by a self-serving bureaucracy in Russia. This is not true. The fight is only just beginning.”

Earlier, he sarcastically thanked Russian authorities for sending him to a region where political prisoners have been exiled for almost 200 years. This was where Tsar Nicholas I sent the Decembrists — a group of reformist aristocrats — after they attempted to stage an uprising in 1825.

In Soviet times, dissidents were also exiled here. Now it is home to Russia’s most prominent critic — the founder of the Yukos oil company, who once topped the Russian rich list with an estimated fortune of $15.2 billion (£8.5 billion).

Inna, his wife, made a point of visiting a church built by the Decembrists in Chita, the regional capital, as she made her way to see her husband this week. “In 180 years, the behaviour of the State has not changed much,” she said.

But Krasnokamensk was not chosen only for its symbolic value. Its location — six hours’ flight plus nine hours’ drive from Moscow — makes it all the harder for Khodorkovsky’s lawyers and relatives to contact him.

The town is also a minefield of health hazards, according to his legal team. Winter temperatures drop to -40C and the prison, like most in Russia, is riddled with tuberculosis. The illness has been diagnosed in five people in YaG-14/10 this year alone. Two inmates have died since January, Nikolai Podprigorin, the head doctor at Krasnokamensk’s state sanitary control centre, said. One died from gangrene, the other from dysentery after sewage leaked into the prison water supply.

Officials say that conditions in the prison are no worse than elsewhere in the country. But Khodorkovsky’s lawyers have an added concern about radioactive contamination from the Priargunskoye uranium mine, 10 miles (16km) away.

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