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Putin’s first term had been drenched in blood and controversy. It led to a sweeping transformation of the way the country was run. He faced a series of deadly terrorist attacks, including the siege of the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow by Chechen terrorists in October 2002. The hostage-taking ended with more than a hundred dead when the Russian security services botched the storming of the theatre and gassed the very theatregoers they’d been trying to free.

Putin’s battles with rebels from the restive northern Caucasus republic of Chechnya had caused thousands of deaths, including the 294 who died in a string of apartment bombings. Many in Moscow whispered Putin’s security services were behind these bloody attacks, not least because the end result was a security clampdown that strengthened his power.

The freewheeling oligarchs of the 1990s were soon brought to heel. It had taken just one big case against the country’s richest man for Putin and his men to rein in the market freedoms of the Yeltsin era, and to launch a takeover by the state.

‘He would have gone gladly after four years, I think,’ Pugachev continues. ‘But then all these controversies happened. With the West now, there is such a serious standoff that it’s almost the Cuban missile crisis. And now he’s gone even deeper … He understands that if it goes further, he will never get out.’

For both these men, the power construct built by Putin, by which the president had accumulated so much power that everything now depended on him, looked the very opposite of stable. ‘It’s a pyramid. All you have to do is knock it once and it will all collapse … He understands all this, but he can’t change himself.’

‘I don’t have the feeling he understands any of this,’ says Yumashev.

‘It would be strange if he said everything I did is backward,’ Pugachev interjects. ‘Many of the decisions he makes are based on his convictions of how the world is run. The subject of patriotism – he believes this sincerely. When he says the collapse of the Soviet Union was a tragedy, he believes this sincerely … He just has such values. What he does he does sincerely. He sincerely makes mistakes.’