Walking down Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street late on Friday evening, the casual observer would find little amiss; not much to suggest that Moscow’s trajectory over recent years, of broader consumer options and improving quality of life for the new urban middle class, was not continuing as before.

In the fashionably overpriced Coffee Mania, women in furs sip green tea through surgically enhanced lips and keep their heavily mascara’d eyes peeled for a wealthy “sponsor”. Further up the road, the stylish cafes and restaurants that have opened in the past two years are heaving: a Brooklyn-style crab joint, a pseudo-English pub named “Cockneys”, various bohemian bars, and a shop staffed by bobble-hatted hipsters that sells luxury Japanese toothbrushes and artisanal bread.

But scratch the surface a little and there is a growing sense of unease. The prices in the shops are rising, and the restaurant conversations are quite likely to be about the state of the Russian economy. Fears were compounded further last week by the rouble’s fall to a new all-time low – it has lost nearly 50% against the dollar this year – and President Vladimir Putin’s uncompromising speech earlier in the week, in which he blamed western attempts to “carve up Russia” for the country’s woes.

Despite western sanctions, the sliding rouble and collapsing oil prices, analysts say it is unlikely that Russia faces a 1998-style default or a life-altering crisis. But the main feeling among the urban middle class is one of unease and uncertainty.

“I don’t think things will necessarily be catastrophic, but it’s definitely a possibility,” says Ilya Tsentsiper, a former magazine editor who now runs his own consultancy firm and is leading a project to redevelop a park full of Soviet exhibition spaces as a new, fun venue for modern Moscow. “People can plan something until the new year, but after that you can imagine all sorts of scenarios. I thought I had felt this feeling some time before, and I realised it feels like the sense I had as a student, where you were looking fowards to the next holidays, but had no idea what would come after that. The main thing is to accept the impossibility of planning anything at all.”

Others are less equivocal. “My commentary on the situation is very simple. Everything is fucked,” said Anton Krasovsky, a former state television presenter who was chief of staff to oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov when he ran against Putin as a Kremlin-sanctioned pseudo-opposition candidate in 2012.

Even though in 1998 millions lost their savings and the worry was not about the supply of sanctioned parmesan but of getting any food at all, Krasovsky claimed the psychological state of Muscovites was actually worse now than in any previous crisis, because there was more to lose. “In 1998 nobody lived well anyway. There was never this sense of hopelessness, when you understand that everything that was good has already passed and now there will only be shit. In past crises there was never this kind of feeling. You can’t get out of a crisis if there’s despondency, and then it was different, everyone was trying to pull themselves together. Now everything is just shit.”

Not everyone is quite as miserable as Krasovsky, but it is unlikely there are many Muscovites who have not experienced a moment of panic over the state of the rouble in recent weeks.

The state of the Russian currency has become the most discussed and satirised issue on the Russian-language internet. “The central bank has decided to allow the free float of the rouble,” reads the caption to one cartoon, featuring a man tossing the currency off a balcony. Another features the rouble and a barrel of oil floating to the bottom of the ocean in a parody of Titanic. The satirical poet Dmitry Bykov even penned verses comparing the effects of war, propaganda and tub-thumping patriotism on the Russian currency and a penis: as the latter gets harder and more excited with Russia’s conquests, the former falls to new lows.

Tsentsiper said: “Nobody knows yet how low it will go. Are we talking about 50-60 roubles to the dollar, are we talking about 100 to the dollar or are we talking about 27 million roubles to the dollar? I can imagine all of these scenarios.”

Putin spoke a lot on Thursday about sanctions and the weak rouble acting as a stimulus for local businesses; that Russian products would now become more competitive. The problem is that Russia does not make all that much, and more money from the oil windfall of the past decade has found its way into offshore bank accounts than it has into innovative startups. More than half of the food in Russia’s supermarkets is imported, and, when it comes to Russian consumer goods, most are either poor quality or simply do not exist. Electronics come from abroad, furniture from Ikea, and rare is the Russian whose wardrobe mostly features garments made in the motherland.

All of this means that the plummeting rouble is likely to have a disastrous effect on everyone, not just the lucky few who have become accustomed to weekending in the south of France.

Businessman Alexander Lebedev, who owns the Evening Standard and Independent titles and runs a Russian bank, has focused his funds in recent years on affordable housing projects and potato farming. Even on a quintessentially Russian product such as the potato, the falling rouble has an enormous effect. “We import all the seeds, most of the pesticides and elements for fertilisers, we import all of the equipment and we import the generators,” said Lebedev, sipping a latte in an upmarket Moscow restaurant.

The businessman, who in previous years has been critical of the Kremlin and who owns part of Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s only independent newspapers, says that “now is not the time for criticism” and has come out in support of Russia’s acts in Crimea, suggesting they could be viewed as a “pre-emptive humanitarian intervention”. Lebedev says western sanctions are pointless. Instead of effecting regime change, he feels, sanctions are only likely to hit ordinary Russians and boost the hawkish sentiments they are meant to quash. “I don’t think the sanctions will affect anything politically, and isolating Russia you really play into the hands of reactionary forces,” he said.

According to Putin on Thursday, the best answer to the imposition of sanctions by nefarious western foes, as well as to Russia’s internal problems, was “freedom for development in the economic, social and civil sectors”.

It was uncharacteristic rhetoric for the former KGB agent, but he quickly qualified the statement by framing his definition of freedom in terms given by the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin: “He who loves Russia should wish her freedom; first and foremost freedom for Russia itself, her independence and international standing … and finally, freedom for Russian people, for all of us.”

Essentially, freedom is all well and good, but the interests of the state come first. And anyone who thought that Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its actions in Ukraine helped precipitate the sanctions and economic decline were hopelessly naive, Putin insisted: the west was simply looking for an excuse to punish Russia and would have found another reason, if not in Ukraine.

For now, the propaganda is working among large sections of the population, and Putin’s approval ratings remain high. But the lukewarm applause for his speech and the uneasy mood in Moscow show that the mood among the elite is changing. Next year, for the first time in many years, real wages will fall. Predicting what happens next is not easy.

“Even if the rouble hits 250 to the dollar, the combination of the level of tolerance of people in this country and the level of political control could keep it afloat for several years,” claimed Lebedev. Others predict things could go wrong more quickly, displaying the traditional Russian quality of gloomy fatalism, even if financial analysts say the medium term holds stagnation rather than crisis.

Krasovsky, who was spending the weekend preparing to play a DJ set at a central Moscow bar, said there is not much to do except enjoy life while it was still possible to do so. “It’s one of those cases where it’s impossible to change anything. Fighting is pointless. If you’ve got a load of cash you can get out, if not, then just sit and watch. What can you do in a plane that is crashing? Pray, maybe.”