Podmoskovny Lyceum was Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s first educational project, set up along with his parents Marina and Boris in 1994. The mission of the Lyceum – a boarding school – is to provide a caring, educational environment for socially underprivileged children, many of them orphans, from around Russia.

Based in the beautiful Korallovo forest on the outskirts of Moscow, the Lyceum cares for and educates 200 pupils at any one time. As well as setting students up for academic success, the Lyceum is a celebration of the arts, with students excelling in music and dance. It also offers extracurricular vocational training, enabling students to reach their full potential across a broad spectrum of areas. Nearly 3,000 pupils have graduated from Lyceum, many of whom have gained places at Russian universities.

The Khodorkovsky Foundation, which had been the sole funder of the Lyceum since 2005.

Our scholarships in Russia were administered by
The Oxford Russia Fund, a related party to the Khodorkovsky Foundation.

The Oxford Russia Fund was focused on the distribution of undergraduate and graduate student scholarships in the field of social sciences and the humanities in 20 Russian universities, from Novgorod in the west to Vladivostok in the east and from Petrozavod in the north to Krasnodar in the south. The Oxford Russia Fund provided from 2005 to 2021 over 41,000 scholarships to Russian students, supporting no less than 2,000 students a year.

The Oxford Russia Fund’s designation as an “undesirable organization” brought to an end Oxford Russia Fund’s work inside Russia.