The man who could be the next president of Russia has a message: Russians want and need continuity. Seven years of Putinism have delivered concrete results – a thriving economy, and bulging reserves.

“Any candidate who will run for the presidency will hardly speak from the platform that everything Putin did was bad,” Sergei Ivanov, first deputy prime minister, told the FT. “Such a candidate won’t have the slightest chance. There could be some kind of marginal figure, a clown. But they would get one per cent, or half a per cent, of votes.”