With the softly spoken diffidence of an academic, Alexei Kudrin seems an unlikely fiscal hard man. Yet as petrodollars have flooded into Russia's state coffers in recent years, he has robustly fended off demands to pour the money into inflationary social spending or tax cuts and insisted instead on hoarding it for the future.

Few finance ministers can have witnessed such a transformation of their country's accounts. When Mr Kudrin took the job in May 2000, Russia's devastating 1998 debt default and the rouble devaluation that wiped out Russians' savings were a recent memory.