Russia’s ruling classes have always been uniquely precarious. Kondrati Rileev, the 19th century poet, even referred to his homeland derisively as a country run by vremenshchiki or “temporaries”.
His words were prophetic: over the past century Russia has been a revolving door for some of the most routinely unfortunate elites in the world: first the 1917 revolution dispossessed the tsarist aristocracy, then dictator Joseph Stalin purged an entire generation of apparatchiks in the 1930s and again in the 1940s.
