Jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky has applied for parole. A similar attempt, lodged as a challenge to Dmitry Medvedev soon after he assumed the presidency in 2008, failed.

Maybe Khodorkovsky, and his jailed former business partner Platon Lebedev, hope things are different this time around. This weekend, one of the three main TV channels in Russia aired a segment on Khodorkovsky’s case, something that sparked widespread debate inside Russia because that just doesn’t happen anymore.

The segment (see below) aired on NTV, the once independent channel targeted by security services shortly after Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency and swiftly handed to state gas giant Gazprom. It appeared on a new show called “Central Television” (a title that plays on Soviet times), which is a new Sunday night show that aims to target Russia’s more modern (read: disenchanted) demographic, by actually discussing things that otherwise only get wide play on the Internet.

“Do you know who this is?” the host, Vadim Takmenev, asks his audience. “You know – it’s Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of Yukos, now Prisoner Number One and a person people really talk about often – but in the halls, in smoking rooms, on the Internet.”

During the eight-minute segment, viewers are walked through Khodorkovsky’s history. It’s sympathetic. We see Khodorkovsky in 2003 walking in slow motion as Takmenev says “he really didn’t know these were to be his last hours of freedom.” Takmenev decries the fact that Khodorkovsky’s case has disappeared from public discussion: “All that remained was the name Khodorkovsky, practically synonymous with ‘enemy of the government’ and ‘loyalty test.’” “It became accepted to say bad things about him or, even better, keep quiet.”

So, is this a sign?

Doubtful. Russia’s leaders, and their chief ideologue Vladislav Surkov, are not stupid. They know complaints about United Russia, as well as about the country’s staid TV stations, have reached a fever pitch. The segment was part of a show precisely designed to counter that, and introduce a degree of (managed) debate to an increasingly tired propaganda scene. The Moscow Times notes that it could also work well in the eyes of the West (the US recently criticized the trial and the European Court of Human Rights is due to rule today on whether Khodorkovsky’s rights have been violated).