Over the ensuing decades, the leaders of the Russian establishment have grown increasingly suspicious and fiercely antagonistic toward Western economic and political institutions. Since 1993, high-ranking bureaucrats, academics, members of parliament, business executives, and top law enforcement and security officials have shown rising levels of anti-Americanism, according to a recent study by the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg and William Zimmerman of the University of Michigan. The source of this antipathy, according to Eduard Ponarin, a professor of sociology at the school, “is elite frustration over the failure to modernize their country along some foreign models.”

Mutual trust between Russian and American elites did rise slightly in the early years of this century. President George W. Bush and Mr. Putin exhibited a warm rapport during their first meeting, in Slovenia in June of 2001. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Kremlin voiced strong support for Washington’s war on terror. But the show of cordiality did not hold: Clashes erupted over the Iraqi war, NATO expansion, and the so-called color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

Anti-Americanism came from the top down. The Russian ruling class saw these events as hostile acts directed at Moscow by the West. President Putin, Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev and their supporters found it politically useful to accentuate anti-American rhetoric to garner public support, especially as the economic growth that heralded Mr. Putin’s early years in power sputtered and faded.

The elites who went through a profound disillusionment with the Western ways are now occupying key decision-making positions in the Kremlin, state-owned business and media. These people learned most of their survival skills in the 1990s. They know how to operate in a market that is barely regulated. They know how to keep their adversaries guessing. It’s an environment where the levels of trust are low, the levels of uncertainty are high and the rule of law does not mean much.

Cynical pragmatism is the order of the day. President Putin and his circle see gullibility and idealism of any kind as a politician’s main weakness. Mr. Putin’s skills — sharpened through the years of growing disillusionment in Russia — are uniquely suited to this environment. He is both very effective in playing upon this distrust of the West and highly adept in his politics of international disruption.