LAST week Vladimir Ashurkov, a former executive at Russia’s Alfa Bank, stood at the front of a tour bus full of journalists and academics threading its way through London’s Whitehall district, lecturing into a microphone as he pointed out an £11m ($16m) apartment belonging to a senior Russian official. Mr Ashurkov is a close ally of Alexei Navalny, a Russian anti-corruption campaigner and opposition politician, and the event was one of a series of “kleptocracy tours” organised by émigré activists to publicise how corrupt regimes launder their fortunes in London’s property market.

Mr Ashurkov fled Moscow in 2014 after prosecutors, in the midst of a crackdown on Mr Navalny, targeted him in an investigation that he says was politically motivated. He was granted asylum in Britain, where he joins a growing community of exiles who have left or been pushed out of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The first Russian to inquire about political asylum in Britain may have been Tsar Ivan the Terrible, who wrote to Queen Elizabeth I in 1570 asking whether she would take him in if things got too hairy in Moscow. (Elizabeth replied that he could come if he paid his own way.) Ivan never came, but England has since offered refuge to generations of Russian political exiles. Alexander Herzen, Russia’s first socialist, came to London in the 1850s and published his newspaper Kolokol (Bell), which was smuggled back into Russia. Lenin lived briefly in Bloomsbury, and is said to have met Stalin at a pub in Clerkenwell. Today London is home both to Mr Putin’s cronies and to opponents of his regime trying to lay the groundwork for the day it vanishes.

Putin or the Ritz

The most prominent political exile is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was one of Russia’s most powerful oligarchs until the government seized his companies and jailed him in 2003. Freed in 2013, Mr Khodorkovsky now calls London “the second-best place to be after Moscow, if you follow Russia”. From his Mayfair office he runs Open Russia, a civil-society group that sponsors discussions between Russian experts, journalists and artists, streamed to Russia via the internet. He has also launched an online university project that looks at Russia’s modern history, in particular the 1990s, not as a period of chaotic weakness (as Mr Putin describes it) but one of cultural vitality and opportunity.

Unlike many earlier dissidents, Mr Khodorkovsky is not directly working to hasten the regime’s end. Instead he aims to nurture a new Russian political elite, so that when the transition comes “we don’t end up in the same place as we did when the Soviet Union collapsed”, lacking leaders with democratic experience. As for what might bring about that change, Mr Khodorkovsky does not think it will be elections. Either Mr Putin will anoint a successor, or there will be “a revolution, with luck a bloodless one”. He has no illusions about how long that might take. “Putin may stay till 2024. This is why I am not working with anyone who is over 40.”

Mr Ashurkov, too, is thinking about the future: “We want to have a seat at a virtual round table about what Russia would look like after Putin.” As a first step, he has launched a project to analyse all the repressive laws passed by the Russian parliament in recent years that would need to be revoked by a future democratic Duma.