Given what he has lived through, Mikhail Khodorkovsky can perhaps be forgiven a few indulgences. One of those is a good steak. "We didn't get meat very often in prison," he tells me as we take a window table amid the dark wood and leather-studded banquettes of Goodman, a Russian-owned steakhouse in London's Mayfair. "And when we did, you never really knew what animal it came from."
While Khodorkovsky is almost certainly the only diner here to have survived 10 years in a Russian gulag, he stands out from the wealthy lunchtime crowd only by virtue of being one of the few not wearing a suit. Even when he was worth $15bn through his stake in the oil company Yukos and was part of the Davos-attending global business elite, Khodorkovsky, like a Russian Richard Branson or Steve Jobs, largely shunned formal attire. Today's blue-grey collared sweater is similar in style to those he wore through his months of appearances in Russian courtrooms during two prolonged, high-profile - and highly political - trials for fraud, tax evasion and embezzlement.
Having been released almost exactly a year ago, Khodorkovsky now lives in Switzerland, and, like a latter-day Lenin or Mandela, he aspires to lead his country to freedom - even if only temporarily. For in recent months Khodorkovsky has put himself forward as a possible interim president in the unlikely event of his nemesis, the Russian President Vladimir Putin, leaving the job.
At 51, Khodorkovsky looks fit for the challenge, his thinning grey hair is as close-cropped as it was when he was released, though he has put on weight since his surprise early release last year, when, in an echo of cold war-era spy swaps, he stepped off a private jet plane at the old East Berlin airport of Schonefeld on December 20.
As he scans the menu, Khodorkovsky sighs: "When you're free, so many temptations . . . " He grins.
What have been his main temptations since his release? "The biggest thing when you're free", he says, "is there's so much that is interesting to do that it's easy to waste time and get deflected from the most important task. Though when you're free, there are lots of important tasks."
Here is a flash of the intensity that made my dining companion both the most successful of the original Russian oligarchs and then the one who fell most precipitously from grace. Born in 1963, he is the Moscow boy who grew up a Communist Youth League leader and dreamt of becoming a Soviet factory boss but who, as soon as Mikhail Gorbachev allowed it in the late 1980s, branched into private business, importing computers and consulting for state enterprises. He went on to found a bank, Menatep, before in 1995 - in controversial privatisation auctions - buying the Yukos oil company and turning it into Russia's biggest. By the early 2000s he was Russia's wealthiest man, and the richest in the world under 40.
But then in February 2003, at a televised meeting at the Kremlin, he challenged Putin over official corruption - as well as more broadly by combining an independent spirit (and rumours of political ambitions) with a large pile of money. His arrest later that year at gunpoint at a snowy Siberian airport marked a major turning point towards the darker, authoritarian regime that rules Russia today, embroiled as it is in conflict in Ukraine and its biggest confrontation with the west since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
We order: a rib-eye steak and green beans for Khodorkovsky; a New York sirloin, with chips, for me. He declines wine, sticking to still water, while I choose a Diet Coke.
I ask about the "loans-for-shares" auctions in 1995 when a handful of businessmen - the oligarchs - lent money to the near-bankrupt Russian state and received stakes in state businesses as collateral. When the state failed to repay the loans, the oligarchs sold the stakes to themselves at knockdown prices. Today the auctions are seen, I remark, as a kind of "original sin" hanging over Russian business.
"I wouldn't entirely agree," Khodorkovsky says. At the time it looked, he continues, as if a Communist candidate would beat President Boris Yeltsin in the elections, which would have spelt the end of private business. Given the risks, no foreign investor was interested. So the shares were worth only what Russian investors would pay - in Khodorkovsky's case, about $300m, for just under 80 per cent of Yukos.
The aggressive way in which Khodorkovsky dealt with Yukos's minority shareholders has to this day left some of those investors vitriolic. So, too, when Yukos's fortunes were turned around and his stake became worth billions, critics saw Khodorkovsky's subsequent philanthropy - through a foundation he named Open Russia - as motivated at least in part by a desire for share-price-boosting respectability. That made him, for many, a somewhat flawed figure as a "prisoner of conscience" - which Amnesty International declared him to be in 2011.
Today, though Khodorovsky signed away his stake in Yukos, during his first trial, to another shareholder, he says is now worth something over $100m.
Our steaks arrive and a waitress hands Khodorkovsky a jug of Stilton gravy. I mention that he recently admitted to mistakes in that period. "Yes, I talked about mistakes, but there's a big distance between mistakes and deliberate violations of the law," he says.
The tax "minimisation" schemes - selling oil through onshore tax havens - at Yukos that were the heart of the trials against him were known to the authorities and even senior ministers, he insists. "In tax law, it's a crime in most countries if you've hidden something. But we didn't hide anything."
. . .
I have met Khodorkovsky before, most memorably in 2008, when I poked a microphone between the bars of his cage in a courtroom in wintry Chita, Siberia, to interview him as he prepared for his second trial. Khodorkovsky also conducted a written interview with me last year - just months, as it turned out, before his unexpected release - his answers smuggled out of his prison colony in the forests of northeast Russia by his lawyers. He described the drudgery of life in what Russians call "the zone": making paper folders in the workshop, endless queues, bowls of balanda, or gruel.
After checking how he is enjoying his lunch - "excellent", he says between mouthfuls - I ask what was the worst moment in jail. Perhaps the time a fellow prisoner slashed his face with a knife as he slept?
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> Surprisingly not. As soon as he went to the wash block and discovered that the wound was not as deep as it first seemed, he says, he got it stitched up and went back to bed. Rather, he found the first two years the toughest. He watched powerless as Yukos was sold off piecemeal to Rosneft, the state-controlled group that is today the world's largest quoted oil producer, to pay off multibillion-dollar tax claims. Dozens of the managers who had worked under him faced legal charges and many more employees lost their jobs."When you're a boss, according to my idea, you should take full responsibility for everything," he says. "If an organisation has a problem, or its employees do, then the boss should sort it out. Otherwise you're not a proper boss."
Khodorkovsky did, however, find a way of exerting some influence over the authorities: hunger strikes. Four times he stopped eating - twice refusing liquids too - mostly to demand an end to abuses of imprisoned ex-colleagues, such as Vasily Aleksanyan, the former Yukos general counsel. Terminally ill with Aids complications and cancer, Aleksanyan claimed in 2008 that the authorities were withholding treatment unless he testified in a new trial against his ex-boss.
"When I heard about Aleksanyan, I had the feeling I could do something," Khodorkovsky says. "Life in a Russian prison makes your own life much cheaper, so it was easy for me to place a kind of stake."
He continues: "They told me they'd start force-feeding me. And I said, 'Guys, do you have experience of force-feeding? Do you know that if someone doesn't want it, you can't force-feed them for long?' Of course, I weighed it up carefully: would I win or lose. If I'd made a mistake, I would have died."
His only concern, he says, was, as a Russian Orthodox believer, how God would view what was essentially suicide. But each time, the authorities gave in to his demands.
Though the plush surroundings of Goodman make an incongruous setting for such a question, I ask, how do you prevent force-feeding?
"If they're feeding you through a probe, it can always lead to you tearing your oesophagus - if you really want that to happen."
And he was ready for this?
"Oh yes," he says lightly. "And they understood that."
We both stare at our plates.
Moments later, a "ping" announces a text message from his wife, who lives with him in Switzerland (the couple have three children, and Khodorkovsky has another child from an earlier marriage). "I like the iPhone 6. I've got big hands," he says. Long fascinated by technology, Khodorkovsky eagerly scanned newspapers even while in prison so he could follow the emergence of such devices.
Harnessing technology and mastering the world of social media that opened up during his decade behind bars is vital, he explains, to his next mission: pushing for political change in Russia. But, I remind him, at the press conference he gave after his release - at the Berlin Wall museum near Checkpoint Charlie - he said he would not enter politics, and only undertake civil society activities.
Yet since his mother's death from cancer in August - Putin granted his request for clemency so that he could care for her in Europe - he has relaunched the Open Russia foundation to support education programmes and "pro-European" candidates in future elections, and has begun touring around conferences. He has announced he is ready, if called upon, to become a transitional president. What changed?
Before he can answer my question, the waitress takes our plates. He turns down dessert, and we order coffee.
. . .
Khodorkovsky insists what he is doing is just "civil society work . . . Politics is in essence a battle to get yourself elected, personally. I'm not interested in this. But to the question, are you ready to go through to the very end: yes, I am. I see this as my civic duty.
"I'm offering myself as a crisis manager. Because that's what I am."
But he stayed on at Yukos, I argue, long after it came out of crisis, and became one of the world's largest non-state oil producers. Yes, he replies - which was why he was looking to leave the business.
Then he makes a startling admission, telling me that before his arrest, he had - as was rumoured at the time - held talks with deputies from Putin's ruling United Russia party and other political groups about constitutional changes were Putin to step down as president in 2008, at the end of his second term. The idea was to make it "safe" for Putin to leave office, by reducing the power of any future president and increasing that of parliament. Khodorkovsky, who was briefly a deputy energy minister in the Yeltsin era, says the politicians he was talking to suggested that he should be interim prime minister, to conduct that reform. As he tells it, he was ready to do so, if the next president wanted him.
Did Putin know about this? Was this why he was arrested?
"Putin knew, but I don't know if [my arrest] was because of this. It was a whole set of reasons. Of course, he was afraid. He feared I might organise a revolution. You know, I didn't have that kind of idea then. But I do now."
He is not planning an actual revolution, he quickly adds: his supporters in Russia do not want it, and it would be dangerous since the country is not, he believes, ready for political change.
Russia is, however, undergoing a severe economic crisis. Combined with a plunging oil price, western sanctions in response to Russian intervention in Ukraine have helped bring about a rapidly devaluing rouble, rising inflation and recession. Some suggest that Putin, despite Ukraine-boosted approval ratings, could fall victim to the problems.
A few days after our conversation, the Russian currency goes into an even more serious meltdown. But Khodorkovsky cautions against over-estimating the impact of the crisis, saying Russia's reserves should be sufficient to get through its difficulties. A popular uprising is possible but unlikely; the street protests of 2011 proved shortlived.
"Economic crisis won't decide anything by itself, unless society understands that there's an alternative," he says. "And that's what we're trying to show people."
If things continue to deteriorate, the Russian president could, says Khodorkovsky, be forced from power in various ways, including a palace coup by his entourage. "We don't know of a single authoritarian regime that is eternal, still less one that's not based on any ideology. There's the question of whether we'll live to see this or not, but there's a chance we will." He laughs.
His programme to set Russia on the path to democracy centres on establishing a pravovoye gosudarstvo, a law-based state, or rule of law. There must be separation of powers, an independent judiciary, independent opposition and regular changes of power. If he became interim leader, he says, he would confine himself to conducting such reforms, then call free elections and stand down.
That might appear a very big "if" but a few weeks earlier Garry Kasparov, the exiled former world chess champion who is an even more outspoken critic of the Kremlin than Khodorkovsky, had told me he considered the former Yukos boss to be the only foreseeable successor to Putin. Khodorkovsky combines the knowhow, says Kasparov, with the powerful purifying effect - deeply resonant in the Russian psyche - of having served a term in prison.
And while many of his countrymen see Khodorkovsky as a crook who got what he deserved, the polls also show that some Russians are starting to agree that his trial was political - and that any debt to society has been paid off.
In the meantime, says Khodorkovsky, the world may experience further crises in its relations with Putin, after his annexation of Crimea in spring. Though many dispute this idea, he claims that Putin triggered the Ukrainian crisis only because his popularity was sagging following corruption scandals and protests over rigged elections in 2011.
"Crimea won't see him through to [the next presidential election in] 2018. So look out for some new adventures from Putin, even if he's not thinking about them today," he says.
As we finish our coffees, I ask Khodorkovsky if he fears for his own safety; he is leaving alone, with no bodyguards in sight. "I understand that decisions about me are taken by only one man. This, of course, provides me with a certain level of protection," he says.
"If I find out that he's given the command, I will try to protect myself in some way. But even though I know Putin has become more emotional these days, I hope he won't go that far."
Neil Buckley is the FT's eastern Europe editor
Illustration by James Ferguson
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