“If you work for the state — if you are a state employee of a certain level especially — and you have your investment outside, you can be easily influenced from that outside, and it can harm the interests of the state,” he said. “You are not safe, in terms of being firm in defending the state’s interests. But on the other hand, if we are speaking about abroad, it is much cheaper to buy a flat somewhere in Bulgaria than here in Moscow. So there is a huge discussion about that.”

Alexander Rahr, one of the experts who attended the Valdai Discussion Club, said he left with the sense that though Mr. Putin has benefited politically by embracing more conservative language, there is something deeper going on.

“He is preparing Russians more and more for the understanding that Russia does not belong to the West, to Western culture anymore, or to Europe in the way that was discussed during the 1990s,” said Mr. Rahr, the author of a biography of Mr. Putin. “He is preparing Russians for something else. Whatever this means is very difficult to say.”

In public, Mr. Putin has lent his voice to the search for patriotic ideas. At a September meeting that started a national push for “patriotic education,” he said that conflict over “cultural identity, spiritual and moral values and moral codes” had become a field of intense battle between Russia and its foes.

“This is not some kind of phobia, it really is happening,” Mr. Putin said, according to the newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta. “This is at least one of the forms of competitive battles that many countries encounter, just like the battle for mineral resources. Distortion of the national, historic and moral consciousness more than once led the whole state to weakness, collapse and loss of sovereignty.”

That theme was reprised this month, on the 400th anniversary of the uprising that expelled a Polish-Lithuanian occupation, ending what Russians call the “time of troubles.”

The message seemed tailored for this suspicious season, when nonprofit groups that receive financing from outside Russia are being labeled “foreign agents” and the legal definition of treason has been broadened to include providing assistance to international organizations. In a videotaped lecture that will be shown in high school classrooms, one of Mr. Putin’s close allies, Sergei Y. Naryshkin, the speaker of the lower house of Parliament, describes the long ago Western occupiers to the accompaniment of dark orchestral music and images of a dead village girl, blazing wood cabins and a cowering child.