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This one held a dozen long banquet tables, all packed with what Anya assumed were the tsar’s noble boyars.

In an important distinction from Western practice, the boyars — Moscow’s version of nobility — held status and property solely at the czar’s pleasure, with no rights of private ownership.

“You English have a saying which is close to my heart, for its spirit is that which rules our boyars: ‘Welcome the coming; speed the parting guest.’

Putin understood that to rule Russia he had to stay genuinely popular with “the masses” and from time to time crack his whip at the elites: a “good tsar” reining in the greedy “boyars”.

That has made the Kremlin virtually the only recourse for Russia’s discontents and bolstered faith in a centuries-old adage: The czar is good, but the boyars—the greedy, sycophantic nobles who surround him—are bad.