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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.

This he afterwards explained by saying that to a boyar the pride of his house and name is his own pride, that their glory is his glory, that their fate is his fate.

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.