This generation, he hopes, will preserve his major achievement: Russia’s re-emergence as a great power, one able and determined to resist the United States. For Mr. Putin, an independent foreign policy is not an instrument but an ultimate objective.

This new cohort includes young technocrats who have different backgrounds and experiences but one thing in common: They are loyal to the regime while aware of its deficiencies. They see themselves as crisis managers rather than visionary leaders. They trust technology and mistrust politics. They know how to carry out Mr. Putin’s instructions but not how to disagree with the president.

Sergei Kiriyenko, the current deputy chief of staff of the presidential administration who in 1998 at the age of 36 was prime minister under Boris Yeltsin and an example of a young liberal reformer, is their coach. In this sense, the contrast between Mr. Yeltsin’s young reformers of the late 1990s and Mr. Putin’s young technocrats of today is revealing.

Mr. Yeltsin’s reformers had a clear political profile: They were liberal and pro-Western and they acted as a team, strongly supporting each other. They had political ambitions and viewed themselves as a political force apart from their connection to the Kremlin. Mr. Putin’s young technocrats, by contrast, are experts in logistics with no identifiable political convictions or loyalty to any constituency. They are not a team and they will not stand for each other.

Until fairly recently, after every election in Russia, the question being raised was who would prevail in the Kremlin: Western-style modernizers or anti-Western hard-liners? This question is no longer relevant.

Speaking English, graduating from Harvard, or working for a big Western company does not tell you much any more about the political views of Russia’s future leaders. The Putin generation of technocrats is Western-style but not pro-Western.

The coming generational change in Russian reality tells us little about the future of the regime, because President Putin is its biggest asset but also the biggest vulnerability. He dominates the political scene to the extent that he promotes to the top only people with moderate ambitions who know how to work for the president effectively but could not be the president.

The irony is that Mr. Putin is placing these new technocrats in power as an alternative to his failed attempt to reinstall the current prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev, as his successor. But in reality the Putin generation is just a collective Medvedev. And when it comes to what post-Putin Russia will look like, the president is back where he was when he put Mr. Medvedev in the Kremlin and then decided to return to his old office.