The two men who run Russia have been sketching varying visions of the future, in what passes for the party conference season. In Sochi a week ago, Vladimir Putin spent nearly three hours parrying questions from the Valdai Club, a group of foreign academics and journalists (including the Guardian) and told them that things would stay as they are. The prime minister looked tanned and fit. His nails were manicured and he turned out for the occasion in a glitzy suit and open linen shirt. If Franklin D Roosevelt had four terms of office, why could not he? Putin poured scorn on the idea of returning to elected regional governors and regaled the company with tales of how one of them bolted through the back door rather than face angry villagers after a disaster.

On Friday it was Dmitry Medvedev's turn to take the stage. The Russian president was flanked in Yaroslavl by South Korea's Lee Myung-bak on one side and Silvio Berlusconi on the other, but the annual gathering had some way to go before it could be called a Russian Davos. Medvedev wanted to knock on the head the notion that Russia was an autocracy – the description Putin seemed only too comfortable with in Sochi. "In Russia there is democracy. Yes it is young, immature, inexperienced but its democracy all the same. We are at the very start of the road."

Maybe, but Medvedev is not at the start of his. A year after his "Go Russia" article in which he tore into Russia's primitive raw-materials-based economy, its chronic corruption and the arbitrariness, lack of freedom and injustice to which its citizens were treated – all his phrases – the question can rightly be asked about when the president intends to set out on his long liberalising journey. By all accounts, not quite yet.

Both performances in Sochi and Yaroslavl are in marked contrast to how government actually functions in Russia. A glimpse into this will be provided at the end of the month by the publication of a book into the Federal Security Service (FSB) by two investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan. Their thesis is that under the aegis of Putin, a veteran KGB officer, the FSB has developed into something more powerful and more frightening that its predecessor. They call it the New Nobility and, significantly, the book will be published in English and outside Russia, before any attempt is made to sell it in Russia.

Soldatov and Borogan stick only to what they know and what they can prove. They discard claims they can not stand up, such as the allegations by Alexander Litvinenko, the former FSB lieutenant colonel poisoned in London, that Putin was behind two apartment bombings in Moscow, which killed over 200 people and were used to launch his career and a second war in Chechnya.

This approach makes their account all the more authoritative. The organisation they describe has grown into every facet of Russian life – the media, business, the internet – but it differs from the KGB in two respects: there is much less political control over the security service than there was under communism, and the generals who run it are now wealthy men, with both land and business interests.

The clearest example of the FSB's new wealth is to be glimpsed behind three metre high walls along the gold coast of Rublyovka. This is the route all occupiers of the Kremlin have taken to their dachas in the forests outside Moscow. It was called the road of the Tsar after Ivan the Terrible used it to go falcon hunting. In Soviet times, the politburo, the central committee, artists and scientists all had wooden retreats along it.

Their wooden dachas in pale, flaking green paint are dwarfed by today's columned brick and stone mansions, which trade hands for millions of dollars. The road of the tsars is now lined with Maserati showrooms and adverts for flats bureaucrats can buy for their mistresses.

In 2006 Viktor Alksinis, a former colonel in the Soviet air force who was elected to the state duma from a district which included the Rublyovka, discovered the state had doled out 99 acres of land in the area to private citizens. They were divided into 90 allotments, 38 of them taken from the funds of the FSB material support management directorate. This land was given outright to former and current high ranking FSB officials. In researching these transactions, Soldatov and Borogan noted that the FSB generals were not noted by name or rank and were merely called: "servicemen who served more than 15 years".

This is just one example out of many presented in the book about who really wields power in Russia. The authors conclude: "Reaping lucrative property in the elite forests of the Rublyovka may comfort generals nearing the end of their careers but does not prepare a new generation to become fair arbiters and respected enforcers in a democratic society."