MOSCOW — When he returned home from work last week, the economist Mikhail E. Dmitriyev found two strangers waiting for him in the entryway. They showed no interest in his wallet but seized a bag that contained his laptop computer, and then beat him so badly he was left with a concussion.
Mr. Dmitriyev is a meticulous analyst, not inclined to hyperbole or speculation. He spent many years inside the system that President Vladimir V. Putin built, part of a team of economic modernizers that included the Sberbank chief German O. Gref and Aleksei L. Kudrin, the former finance minister.
That is why people paid attention in 2011, when Mr. Dmitriyev's research center reported a surging demand for political change from the urban middle class, describing its swift growth during the Putin era as "a political detonator which cannot be unscrewed."
Much has occurred between now and then. Protests materialized, as Mr. Dmitriyev predicted, and were quelled. In January, Mr. Dmitriyev was removed as the president of his organization, the Center for Strategic Research, telling an interviewer that he may have angered officials by criticizing the government's new pension policy. This week, he is trying to reason his way through the mysterious attack.
"The police suggested that my business competitors might have stood behind it, trying to get commercially valuable data, but there was no such information in my computer which could have justified violent robbery, and my company is a research center with a rather limited budget," he said. "So, one can guess at non-economic reasons behind this crime. We cannot rule out that this may reflect a growing intolerance to independent thinking in Russia."
Moscow these days is a nervous city. Mr. Putin has rebuilt his popularity by pivoting away from urban elites to an audience of less privileged, conservative voters, starting an anti-Western information campaign that has reached its apex with the standoff over Crimea.
Mr. Putin's move to reclaim Crimea is popular among Russians, even liberal ones. This is a function of history; Nikita S. Khrushchev transferred Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic for reasons that are debated to this day, not anticipating that the Soviet collapse would sever it from Russia.
But Mr. Putin is also announcing a change within his society: a turn inward, away from the West. Russia's "Western influences," of course, are people — economic, political and intellectual elites whose work has long since woven them into Western Europe and the United States. In a solemn speech last week, Mr. Putin set the stage for a purge of dissenters. "Some Western politicians already threaten us not only with sanctions, but also with the potential for domestic problems," he said. "I would like to know what they are implying — the actions of a certain fifth column, of various national traitors?"
Time will tell whether this rhetoric will truly translate into a "change of the elite" — a phrase that pro-Kremlin analysts use with a straight face these days.
Nikolay V. Petrov, a professor at the Higher School of Economics, sees the change this way: Leading economic technocrats, who once served as a counterpoint to the conservative "shareholders" around Mr. Putin, will find themselves increasingly limited to technical roles, or replaced by people perceived as more loyal.
The technocrats were important to Mr. Putin at one time, when he believed liberal economic reforms could make Russia into a first-rung world power, Professor Petrov said, but now he has given up on that idea, and is looking instead to Russia's geostrategic position as a way to assert its might on the global stage.
With that shift has come something new: focused pressure on critical voices from the liberal economic bloc. Sergei M. Guriev, an economic adviser to former President Dmitri A. Medvedev, moved to France last year, fearing that he would be targeted in a political prosecution. Sergei V. Aleksashenko, a former deputy head of Russia's central bank who participated in antigovernment protests, took a job in Washington last year after his bids to be re-elected to the boards of three state-controlled corporations were blocked.
Mr. Dmitriyev, for his part, is still in the hospital, but when he gets out he plans to continue his work in Russia. He predicts that the Crimean crisis will trigger a "new wave of uncertainty and change" that could imprint Russians' political views for years to come. His center plans to carry out polling to capture this change as it takes shape. First, though, he will have to get a new laptop.
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