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I suggested that, broadly speaking, taking into account the right to vote in free elections and the supremacy, for most of the time, of the rule of law, that yes, on the whole, both states could fairly be called democracies.

“Well,” one of them countered, “I don’t like that type of democracy. Democracy for Russia would be death because people don’t like democracy at all.”

For good measure, her friend added: “Nobody cares about anything here. That is part of our life and part of our freedom. We have freedom because everyone can choose.”

“Can you then be free in a dictatorship?” I asked in an effort at philosophical enquiry.

“We have dictatorship already, so we are free,” I was told. And with that, one of the most beautiful and delicate daughters of Putin’s Russia threw back her head, held her empty champagne glass high in the air and chortled mockingly at my leaden curiosity about such irrelevant notions.

There was no meeting of minds. If ever I needed any reminder that Russia’s political culture is deeply different from ours, this was it. They were as serious as I was and as genuinely baffled by my preoccupation as I was by their insouciance. I gave up and got quietly drunk instead.

The next day, Alexei, an architectural historian who held down a senior but evidently mind-numbing administrative role at the Hermitage, took me on a guided tour through one of the city’s many semi-formal gardens.

I noticed that he used the word “Leningrad” interchangeably with “St Petersburg”, and I wondered if he had a soft spot for the Soviet era.

He answered obliquely but far more seriously than his peers at the party: “The city was an idealistic dream, and I was raised in an idealistic society. As a child I could recognise such an entity as ‘the Soviet people’, and that is why for many Russians, and especially for my generation, the collapse was such a shock.”

Communism, he said, “was very repressive ideologically, but it had its dreamy side as well. It was, in many respects, a highly idealistic society. We had no opportunities, but we also had no desires. We were equal even at different levels. Now we have to become Americanised and it is happening to all of us. We have to become like everywhere else in the world. I don’t like it. It doesn’t make any sense. I now look at young people and see they have very different values. I thank God that personally I am not motivated by the market economy, that I am not 20 and that I will not end my life like they will.”

I thought of all those artists, writers, intellectuals and musicians of the Soviet era who had had to dance to the Kremlin’s tune or face denunciation or, worse, exile in Siberia — and I asked again about democracy. Was it an issue for him? “We have no democracy — there is no democracy in Russia.” Would there ever be democracy? “No. After 15 years from the end of communism, we have now a one-party system.”

What about freedom? “Yes, we have freedom to talk, but freedom has advantages and disadvantages.

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