2nd week. It’s an uninspiring sort of concept. On the other hand, (although I suppose it was technically 1st week) the freshers had their first real taste of anachronistic Oxford absurdity with their matriculation ceremony. I loved matriculation – an excuse to pose for daft photos of launched hats forbidden to be worn, a pub crawl in pseudo-white-tie, and a useful lesson to never, ever go to Clems again. A Mr. John Moynihan, of Balliol College, felt differently in 1969, when Cherwell reported ‘A colourful anti-matriculation ceremony will take place on Tuesday, 21st October.’ Mr Moynihan first made his name in Oxford last year by going through the matriculation ceremony in drag. [He said]; ‘Our intention is to disrupt seriously, in the funniest and jolliest way possible, what we consider to be an anachronistic ceremony, that long ago outlived its usefulness.’

On the topic of sartorial peculiarity, we have an Evelyn report from 1980 of a character known to us all for his Tory-blue tie – William Hague. Poor Will gets stood up by his ‘frunions’ as ‘Thompson… has been twice persuaded to break blood pacts with cuddly northerner William Hague.’First, he agreed not to stand as Secretary;  then, again, he agreed not to stand as President this time round. Hague is so worried by Thompson’s steamroller campaign that he has taken up a deliberate policy of wearing bomber jackets, training shoes, etc. in preference to the traditional Pelling-style 8-piece suits.’ Ten points to the next person who shows up at P&P in a bomber jacket and air force ones.

In more recent news, 2003 saw Pembroke buying a new feline friend after their old moggie was purportedly hurled from Christ Church’s Tom Tower. Cherwell reported ‘when a Christ Church cow was painted Pembroke pink and died two years ago, rumour has it that Christ Church retaliated by hurling Pembroke’s beloved cat, Molly, off Tom Tower. If you’d like a further clarification of the absurdity of painted animals, I suggest you take some time to watch the pets episode of Russell Brand’s Ponderland. Keep an open mind – I didn’t ever think a video of a man hiring a boy to dunk birds in coloured dye would ever be of any use, but I just filled the rest of this article with it. 

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theoretical pyramid which ranks five different categories of human needs. On the bottom are base needs such as food and sleep. Above this come safety and security. Thirdly we look for love and belonging, then esteem in the form of respect and confidence and finally self-actualisation in the form of morality and creativity.

I met Pavel Khodorkovsky on Tuesday after he spoke against the motion ‘This House believes that what happens in Russia stays in Russia’  at the Oxford Union. He took me from Maslow to Moscow by explaining how Vladimir Putin is attempting to jump the Russian state to the fourth ‘esteem’ stage without firstly ensuring the security of individuals and private property required by stage two.

Russia is now a world power with a strong sense of national identity and pride that it lacked a decade ago. However it fails to observe the rule of law, perhaps the most fundamental tenet of a liberal democratic state. The most high profile victim of Eurasia’s ‘managed democracy’ has been the oligarch and anti-Kremlin activist Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He was once Russia’s richest man, but is now languishing in prison until 2017 on fraud charges considered by Amnesty International and Western governments to be politically motivated.

His son Pavel is lobbying internationally to raise awareness of the situation in Russia. He explained that British people should care both because of basic humanitarian empathy and because the powerful geopolitical pull of Russia affects Britain’s national interests in fields  such as energy, security and diplomacy. He described how the UK ‘should be interested in having a fair partner. Not someone who uses force in their diplomacy, but someone on the same level’.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky can hardly call himself lucky, but his son recognises that his case at least has international press attention. The same cannot be said for the thousands of other businessmen, journalists and political activists detained in the Russian Federation. After learning of the extent of journalistic repression I had to get Pavel to calm my fears that an apparatchik in a dimly lit office on the outskirts of Moscow might be etching my name onto a new file while you read this.

Khodorkovsky emphasised how middle class democratic disengagement in Russia is due to the powerlessness and the predictability of the system. ‘They have been cheated time and time again and they believe that whatever they do will have no effect on the result.’

The journalist Ed Lucas, another speaker at Tuesday’s debate, told the audience that ‘Russia is the world’s smallest democracy. There are two people in it, and only one of them votes.’ Putin will become Russia’s next President in March after confirming three weeks ago that he rather than the incumbent President Medvedev will be the candidate for the establishment United Russia party.

His last four years as Prime Minister were largely spent behind the scenes, less concerned with public relations than consolidating power. There are also several recent examples where he has clashed with foreign journalists and officials, and Khodorkovsky predicts he will come back a ‘much tougher person to deal with’.

The ‘gangster capitalism’ of Russia stems from the break-up of the USSR two decades ago. Shares in former state owned companies were distributed amongst the Russian people. Rather than this having an equitable effect, a few oligarchs bought up most of the shares.Khodorkovsky highlights that this makes the Russian system perhaps easier to destabilise than other regimes. ‘Anyone found engaging in human rights abuses should be denied visas. Destabilising the mafia-like structure starts with only one to two hundred people – if these fall the whole system will fall.’ He sees the UK as complicit in propping up the oligarchs by allowing them to live and operate financially in London while sending their children to British private schools, and implores us to engage with Russian students in the UK.

The tension which led to the imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky stemmed from his attempts to get involved in politics. The essence of the Russian state’s relationship with the super-rich is that they may do what they like so long as they stay out of politics.

Khodorkovsky highlighted that these are uncertain times for Russia economically and demographically. Its budget deficit is projected to continue growing in 2013-2014, and the reserve fund which finances government borrowing is running out. Russia also suffers from declining birth rates; its population is projected to fall 20% by 2050. He sees Putin as having two options. Either he continues to repress, which could lead to disorder nationwide, and even another war in Chechnya or the Caucasus, or he makes significant concessions.

Pavel Khodorkovsky, in an American twang from living in the States for the past eight years, spoke movingly about how his daughter has never met her grandfather. Though this is just one isolated case in the world’s largest country by geography, one must take concern at the egregiously autocratic nature of a state expected by many to simply slide into democracy after the Cold War. Russia’s long term future is entirely unclear, but its short term future looks grim.

How did authorities react to you as a Western reporter?

I arrived in Moscow in February 2007 which was possibly the worst timing for a British citizen to show up because Alexander Litvineko had just been murdered with polonium two months earlier in a plot which had the fingerprints of the FSB [the successor agency of the KGB] all over it.  Not only was it a major international scandal, it utterly wrecked the Anglo Russian relationship. Within a few months, I found myself caught up in what felt like an incompetently written Cold War drama.  Robert Gates, the last American Defence Secretary, called Russia an ‘oligarchy run by security services’ and it’s true – the apex of the state are often ex-KGB and come with all the ideological baggage you’d expect. The Guardian interviewed the prominent ex-patriot Boris Berezovsky and he claimed to be plotting a revolution against Putin. Purely because I was a Guardian journalist I was summoned to the infamous Lefortovo prison. They genuinely believed I was some sort of James Bond figure and from then on I was followed around by young guys in leather jackets every day: they’d sit so close in restaurants they’d practically be on your lap. They created a whole catalogue of psychological soft torture for me and my family – break ins, strange alarm clocks going off at 4am, a sex manual left on the bed, central heating disconnections, deleted emails. The idea was to wear me down until I couldn’t take it anymore – they decided disappearances and murders were no good if you wanted to be a respectable regime.

How much power do the FSB really wield, and how do their tactics affect the population?

The Orange revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia in 2004 and 2003 respectively terrified the Russian elite. That’s when the FSB budget was really stepped up. Since Putin’s premiership it’s become the most prominent agency in Russia, used against opposition leaders and human rights workers. The bravest people are Russian journalists and human rights workers, those in Chechnya, the Caucasus. Anna Politkovskaya’s murder inquiry was of course inconclusive.

Scare tactics work differently on different people. They are particularly effective on single women – they did it to one of my assistants. I was just furious. It made my writing tougher because I knew that the gap between public pronouncements about modern Russia as a democracy and the rule of law and the observance of human rights were in fact a joke. Putin sets the tone. He believes that corrupt authoritarian methods are more efficient that democratic ones. He doesn’t even believe the West are real democracies. We know from Wikileaks he’s bought Berlusconi and Gerhard Shroeder.

How would you describe the current political climate?

The whole Russian system is decorative: of course Putin is coming back to power. The decision has already been made by the elite and it’ll be passed off as a democratic choice but of course it’s not. Russia is sliding towards a central Asia style dictatorship – they’re isolated from the global conversation. These are people whose minds were forged in the Soviet era but who are now trying to deal with a world of Twitter and Livejournal. Russia in the 1990s was chaotic and Yeltsin was very unpopular but the state was at least quasi-democratic. The problem now is that there is a very cynical, very clever and deeply corrupt vertical system. All real opposition is squeezed. That’s not to say it’s the Soviet Union, because it’s not – there are bloggers and one or two independent newspapers but the regime is sophisticated. Putin’s great genius is realising that you don’t have to control private space. People can have affairs, behave badly, get drunk, and that’s OK. Previous Soviet dictators wanted to control everything. Putin gets it: this is new school.

The one place this regime is vulnerable is monetary. Not through diplomatic pressure, or what Cameron might say in Moscow, or students protesting outside the embassy, but the threat of visa bans and losing all their money. The money of the Russian elite is filtered off and spent in the west, and that’s the only lever we have.

Mafia state was published by Guardian Books on 29 September and is available on Amazon.co.uk and in all major bookstores