Why has Russia been so grossly corrupt, and so irredeemably, for so long? The problem has been around for centuries, as any reader of early-nineteenth-century satirist Nikolai Gogol will know. He described a world of petty, sycophantic, thieving bureaucrats and swinish, dishonest peasantry. Grotesque caricatures, for sure, but uncomfortably close to all-too recognizable Russian types one encounters every day in modern Moscow.

 An intriguing insight into the philosophical underpinnings of the problem comes from Alain de Botton, who observes that in America, wealth has been seen as a reward for virtue ever since the Enlightenment - an apparent reversal of the Old Testament injunction that the "pursuit of money is the root of all evil."  Rather, argued  William Lawrence, Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts in 1892, "In the long run, it is only to the man of morality that wealth comes. We, like the Psalmist, occasionally see the wicked prosper, but only occasionally. Godliness is in league with riches." The problem with Russia is that ordinary people have seen the wicked prosper - and only the wicked - for generations. The virtuous, in Russia for much of the last century, were either poor, or, if industrious, rapidly and violently dispossessed of their wealth thanks to the jealousy of their neighbors or the arbitrariness of authority.

The pattern continues today, in spades. For much of the 1990s, the dishonest, the violent and the corrupt prospered, while the hardworking and cultured suffered. There's a biting moment in Viktor Pelevin's 2000 satire 'Generation P' when an advertising copywriter comes up with a clever slogan, only to have it knocked down by his boss who says, "the only people educated enough to understand that are selling cigarettes by the metro." The days of the intelligentsia selling cigarettes - or for that matter of dissident poets-turned-street cleaners - are past. But the profound conviction of most Russians that the wealthy are just lucky, rather than deserving, remains. That's a massive gulf between Russia and Anglo-Saxon civilization. American oligarch John D Rockefeller had no compunction about announcing that the Lord had made him rich as a reward for his virtues of hard work, thrift and perseverance. Its hard to imagine a modern Russian oligarch (such as  41-year-old Roman Abramovich, worth $21 billion, or 39-year-old Oleg Derepaska, worth $14 billion) claiming any such divine - or virtuous - justification for their riches. For the Russians, it seems, wealth is a commodity distributed by a capricious, rather than a meritocratic, God.