Amid the collapse of Communism, the old "whites" lost out. Politicians such as Boris Yeltsin liked some of the trappings of imperial Russia, such as the double-headed eagle and a quasi-establishment role for the Russian Orthodox Church. History books treated the white generals of the civil war era more fairly. People were fascinated by the Tsarist reformers, such as Piotr Stolypin and Sergei de Witte. But the politicians of the 1990s wanted a functioning capitalist economy, not a reversion to the failed system that had preceded the Communist one. Monarchist and nationalist parties stayed on the margins of politics. The dead Romanovs were reburied decently, but nobody took seriously any attempt to restore the live ones to power.

In retrospect, the big failure of those years was to neglect the "white" cause that now inspires the demonstrators: the rule of law. Replacing debased and demolished Soviet institutions was hard; so was finding people with the attitudes and experience needed to make a law-governed society work. The institutions that did grow up had nothing to do with legality and everything to do with power. Business and bureaucratic interests fused, initially with the tycoons — the oligarchs — gaining the upper hand; and after 1999, with Mr Putin in charge, their replacement, the siloviki or men of power. 

The two most important characteristics of Russian politics in the past 20 years have been pretence and colossal self-enrichment. The pretence is of democracy. Russia has elections where the results are known in advance, just as it has criminal trials where the verdict is decided in advance, and television news where the running order depends not on the events of the day but the worldview that officials want displayed. Yet the truth is that Russia's state agencies and political procedures are a mirror image of what one might expect. The police exist not to prevent crime, but to perpetrate it. Politicians do not serve voters; they boss them about. Officials do not protect the public interest; they prey on it. 

The colossal self-enrichment began when Russia was still poor, with the looting of natural resource industries. Even in the most ramshackle economy, you can make money digging things out of the ground. But the looting machine that has grown up since the 1990s is far more sophisticated. It involves companies that play complex games on international energy markets, shovelling tens of billions of dollars into obscure offshore companies whose ultimate ownership is unclear. It also involves the collection of huge bureaucratic "rents" — payments extracted from the system by corrupt officials who abuse their position.