One such fraud was uncovered by a lawyer called Sergei Magnitsky, working for the Anglo-American financier Bill Browder. He was arrested on a trumped-up charge, and died in agony in prison from an untreated medical complaint. Browder has set up a formidable team to avenge Magnitsky's death by exposing the regime's looting and wrongdoing. His rough estimate is that the top 1,000 people in Russia have stolen a trillion dollars (£600 billion) in the past ten years. Much of that has been laundered in London, New York, Frankfurt and Zurich, with hefty kickbacks for the Western bankers involved. That is one reason why the Putin regime has received such a soft ride from the outside world. Another is tough libel laws, which make it an expensive and risky business to report the specifics of Russia's business  shenanigans.

Simple greed is only part of the story. Ideology plays a role too. The spooks' priesthood of the siloviki is not a coherent political movement, but they do share some deeply-held ideas about the Russian state and its destiny. They do not mourn Communism (as insiders in the old system, they know that the one-party state and the planned economy simply did not work). But they do mourn Soviet power: Putin notoriously called the collapse of the Soviet Union the "geopolitical catastrophe" of the last century. They venerate the old KGB and its achievements. It is rather as if a bunch of ex-Gestapo types were running modern Germany, believing Nazism was flawed but that the Third Reich was glorious.

Putin's great good fortune was that a soaring oil price masked the contradictions that the new "whites" are now highlighting. Was Russia really a democracy? Or was it a state in which the rulers rigged elections? Yeltsin started the rigging in the mid-1990s; Putin merely continued it. Few minded. Rising living standards blunted the edge of dissatisfaction. Moreover, the opposition politicians seemed a ragtag lot: with no alternative to Putin in sight, protest was hardly a rewarding pursuit.

Another big contradiction was about economics: was Russia a free-market economy, or a dirigiste one where the route to prosperity came via political influence? Russia's new business class were too busy making money to worry much about the way the system worked. The arrest in 2003 and imprisonment after a show trial of the country's richest man, the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was a one-off: he had meddled in politics, ignored warnings and got his comeuppance. For lesser business folk the corrupt and predatory bureaucracy was a nuisance, raising costs and distorting decision-making. But it was a manageable risk.