Mikhail Kasyanov, a former Prime Minister in President Vladimir Putin's government, has been charged with corruption related to the purchase of a piece of land by his wife, shortly before he was dismissed from office. The charges are being introduced by a journalist and pro-Putin member of Russia's parliament, Alexander Khinshtein.

Kasyanov has previously refused to rule out a run for President in 2008, when Putin is term-limited by the Russian constitution. One ironic note from the story

In an article in the newspaper Moskovski Komsomolets last week, Mr Khinshtein claimed Mr Kasyanov acquired a dacha once occupied by Mikhail Suslov, the chief ideologist to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, in a corrupt auction.

The report alleged that the lease on the land where the dacha stood, worth an estimated�16m, was then acquired for a knockdown price by a front company acting for Mr Kasyanov and his wife, Irina.

The 11.5 hectares of state land in Troitse-Lykovo, western Moscow, is on the banks of the river next to a dacha owned by the reclusive former dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It includes a tennis court and a private beach.

So Russia's greatest dissident in modern times found a dacha next to one formerly owned by the servant of one the worst leaders of the Soviet era. Big country, small world.