‘My dear comrades, isn't it time we started setting the fashion in the world automobile industry?" These were the words with which a young, energetic and immensely popular general secretary addressed a group of corpulent men who, together with local gangsters, had spent a quarter of a century running the assembly lines set up on the banks of a great Russian river by some inventive sons of the Mediterranean.

Back in those prehistoric times, the bourgeois, decadent concept of political ratings didn't yet exist. Had there been such a thing, the charming chatterbox's fall in popularity would have been accurately traced back to that precise moment.

"My esteemed minister-capitalists, isn't it time we set ourselves some more ambitious objectives? Shouldn't we try to catch up with the leading industrialized countries?" With these words, 16 years later, a young, energetic and immensely popular president addressed a group of remarkably similar men, involved in remarkably similar activities, only this time at the national level.

A few days later, he delivered the same message to an expanded assembly of top Party and economic cadres, or, as one would say these days, of the Russian political elite. Not so long ago at all, the elite's behavior, in appearance at least, on such ritual occasions, fitted Joseph Brodsky's words:

"When He enters, they all rise – some out of duty, the rest out of joy."

But this time, "He" was met by the heavy silence of an audience that remained seated and faces wearing a mute but growing irritation. The elite knew that the president realized the people seated before him had not only long since made it in life, but had achieved such ambitions as would make the fortunes of even their great-grandchildren.

To reproach them with lack of ambition and demand of them another leap forward to catch up with Portugal, of all places, was the height of tactlessness and blatantly violated the agreements on the transfer of power. All the more so as the president himself likes to repeat that he is nothing more than a manager hired by the Board of Directors. (Mao Tse Tung was more poetic: He compared himself to a solitary monk wandering the world with an umbrella full of holes.)

The audience had another, very Russian, reason for their irritation. The president's glorious first days overflowed with so many fighter planes, submarines, patriarchs, outhouses in which the enemies of the Reich met their end, Pavlovskys squealing about a "mystical link between Putin and the people" and fearless chekists marching confidently into power that the Russian political elite pricked up its ears like an old war horse, fancying it had heard the familiar horn sounding.

As if submitting to a desire born out of historical memory, this political elite, ruthlessly whipped by Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Stalin the Bloody, obediently bent over and lowered their trousers to reveal their guilty buttocks to the president, mistaking him for the long-awaited night porter.

They expected a spanking at the very least, and maybe something more decisive, a more Caligula-style affirmation of his status and role.

But maybe all the president's chekists, drunk on their new-found opportunities, raced off to provide protection for furniture stores, trading in the honor of Iron Felix for a soup ration of dollars. Or maybe the whole idea simply put him off.

Whatever the case, the elite grew tired of its awkward position and, not getting the deep satisfaction it desired, felt doubly insulted and humiliated. The court stopped playing to its king's wishes.

When this happens, the king usually gets himself a new court. Or the court gets itself a new king.

The writer is director of the Center for Strategic Research.