After I’d asked about the make of a car in front of us, he was quick to point out others. ‘That is big-engine Volga. This is tenth-model Lada. This is Zhigudi.’ Then he added contemptuously, ‘Nobody want Russian cars.’ What he coveted, I could see, was a BMW or a Mercedes, a few of which nosed through the rush-hour crawl, sleek and well-polished.

As we drew away from a set of lights, he said, ‘Now we are on Shosse Entusiastov.’ He turned to me with a grin. ‘All revolutionaries who must go to prison use this street!’ He saw me looking puzzled and went on, ‘Why? Because in Communist era all people sentenced to gaol passed along this highway to the gulags. They never return! Nobody return! The street goes to Siberia.’

Our journey took less than an hour, and as we drove the morning began to brighten: the air was quite warm, and as the cloud thinned we started getting glimpses of blue sky. After a scatter of new high-rise blocks on the outskirts of the city, we passed under the ring-road whose lights we’d seen from the air, and suddenly Moscow was at an end. The land here was dead flat; enormous fields stretched away on either side, apparently uncultivated, covered in rough grass, punctuated with tussocks a couple of feet high. Then, on our right, we started passing a forest which exactly matched my expectations of Russia: tall, slender silver birches with bark mottled white and grey rising among dark green pines, giving a pleasantly open texture to the wood.

I was admiring the trees when I realised that a uniformed man had walked out into the road ahead and was flagging us down with a black-and-white baton.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked quickly.

‘It is nothing.’ Sasha sounded unmoved. ‘Only GAI, the traffic police, making checks.’

He pulled in to the verge, and the cop came to the window. He wore a grey uniform with a thin red stripe down the seam of the trousers. Sasha wound down his window and started to give the policeman a bollocking. Even I could understand what he was saying: that he was an army officer on an important mission and had no time to piss about. But the cop gave him as good as he got, and after a minute Sasha gave a sigh.

‘Isvinite. He demands my documents. One minute, please.’

Muttering under his breath, Sasha leant across me to extract an envelope from the dashboard pocket, got out of the car and followed the man into the flat-topped concrete hut at the side of the highway. Waiting, we had time to take in the decrepit surroundings: the road’s edge churned up, rutted mud beyond the tarmac, heaps of rusting metal lying about, broken drainpipes dumped in a heap.

‘What it is,’ said Whinger thoughtfully, ‘is the size of this godforsaken country. At home everything’s neat and tidy because we have so little space. Here there’s millions and millions of fucking acres, and it doesn’t matter if you scatter rubbish about.’