Vladimir Putin's Novorossiya may mark just the start of his empire-building ambitions...........

Russia's President Vladimir Putin

 For a man who has made a career out of Soviet-era nostalgia, it was a timely reminder that not every memory of life back in the USSR is a cherished one. As Vladimir Putin made his state-of-the-nation speech last week, berating the West for stealing Russia's imperial glory, his citizens were once again cursing the uselessness of the rouble.

Thanks to sanctions imposed over Mr Putin's annexation of Crimea, the currency is once again a minnow in the world financial markets, losing roughly half its value this year. Food prices, even for basics like bread, have increased by ten per cent in two months alone, and just as in Communist times, when Russians hankered over Beatles cassettes and denim jeans, Western luxuries are once again at a premium.

Last week, the price of an Apple iPhone in Moscow's shopping malls went up by a quarter. And thanks to retaliatory sanctions on European food imports by the Kremlin, everything from French cheese and Spanish ham is now off the menu.

Even Russia's prostitutes are fed up. In the docklands of Murmansk, in Russia's frozen north, calls girls serving passing sailors threatened last week to peg their rates to the dollar. "We are trying to keep prices down," one brothel owner told a local news agency. "But the cost of living is rising."

Unlike in the days of Stalin and Brezhnev, Russians today can at least joke about their woes in public. Newspaper cartoons show the rouble as a hapless rollercoaster passenger, while on the Internet, a fake 10-million rouble note from the "Imperial Bank of the New Russian Federation" hints at fears of Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation.

But while Mr Putin may not be slinging his satirists in jail, it is clear he does not find the situation very funny. Nor, crucially, does he think it is his fault. Far from using Thursday's annual address to draw a line over this year's confrontation, he blasted his Western opponents like never before, comparing them to Hitler, and hinting that they might one day face a similar defeat at the hands of his armies.

"They (The West) would have been delighted to let us go the way of Yugoslavia, with all the tragic consequences," he told an audience of apparatchiks and Orthodox clergymen in the white marbled-chamber of the Kremlin's St George Hall.

"But it did not happen. It also didn't work out for Hitler, who with his man-hating ideas wanted to destroy Russia and throw us beyond the Urals. It would be good to remind everyone of how that ended."

So how then, exactly, will things end if Mr Putin has his way? Was the speech the bluster of a man who has pushed his luck too far? Or was he laying down the gauntlet for yet more confrontations with the West – and yet more Crimea-style landgrabs?

In the view of Russia's opposition – what is left of it – the fact that Mr Putin is lashing out does indeed show his weakness. Not only have the sanctions have proved far harsher than the Kremlin gambled on, they have hit particularly hard in an economy already stagnant from 15 years of command-cronyism. As Vladimir Ryzhkov, a leading opposition politician, put it last week: "The country needs surgery, and he proposed therapy." However, snappy sound bites from Moscow's liberal minority cannot disguise the fact that despite dragging the country to both war and recession – the Kremlin admitted last week that Russia's economy will shrink next year – Mr Putin remains phenomenally popular.

His personal approval ratings reached 88 per cent during last summer's invasion of eastern Ukraine, and although the sanctions have cooled the fervour somewhat, the ratings have only fallen by three per cent. No Western leader ever comes close to such figures – much less do Russia's liberal opposition parties, whose image as "Brie-munching cosmopolitans" seldom polls them more than a few per cent in elections.

Then again, judging modern Russia by standard democratic yardsticks is a mistake in the first place, according to Andrew Wilson, author of the acclaimed new book Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West.

"Western leaders would cut their arms off for Putin's ratings, but what it tells us is that Russia's political system is still very different," he said. "It is still a propaganda state, the difference being that while in Communist times people would just tune out, today the propaganda is much more emotional and engaging.

"Putin's speech was all about Russia having to survive on its own in a hostile world. His even claimed that the sanctions would have happened anyway because the West is out to get Russia. It's nonsense on stilts, but it works for his audience."

As proof of the ready appetite for Mr Putin's message, Mr Wilson points to how it now even dominates Russian prime time television. In August, the Night Wolves, an ultranationalist biker gang that the president has been photographed with, guest-starred in a triumphant evening musical broadcast from Crimea, alongside footage of Ukrainian troops marching in Nazi-style goosesteps. Mr Wilson likened it to the spoof Mel Brooks musical Springtime for Hitler – the difference being that the Russian version was not intended to be funny.

Such programmes show how Mr Putin has deftly tapped into Russians' sense of patriotism – evoking Moscow's defeat of the Nazis, while pursuing what critics say are alarming similar policies of expansionism. Indeed, they fear that Crimea and eastern Ukraine – dubbed Novorossiya by Mr Putin himself – may mark just the start of his empire-building ambitions, which reach right across the seven time zones of Russia's vast backyard.

In the ex-satellite republics of Latvia and Estonia, he has stirred trouble among the large ethnic Russian minorities, having never forgiven either country for the haste with which they switched sides to Nato. Russian subs and bomber planes are now a common feature over the Baltic Seas, probing Nato's air defences in a manner not seen since the Cold War.

In tiny Moldova – another EU hopeful – the Kremlin retains a garrison of troops in Transdniestra, a Russian-speaking breakaway that nobody else recognises. Similar arrangements exist in the pro-Moscow enclave of South Ossetia, Russia's main prize in its 2008 war with Georgia. And in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, Moscow has been carefully strengthening ties with its old Slavic ally Serbia, which it backed during the Balkans civil war.

Belgrade hosted Mr Putin for a state visit in October, putting on a vast military parade in his honour. It has also refused to support European Union-led sanctions against the Kremlin, despite potentially jeopardising its own EU accession bid. Not that Russia particular loses either way.

"Having Serbia in the EU would actually work quite well for Russia – it would be a like a Trojan horse," said Mr Wilson.

In more distant corners of Moscow's old empire, even leaders who are no friends of the West are looking over their shoulder. In Soviet-throwback Belarus, and in autocratic Kazakhstan, presidents Alexander Lukashenko and Nursultan Nazarbayev both fret privately about losing their independence.

About the only neighbour that watches Moscow without much anxiety is China – partly because Beijing knows that if sanctions continue, it may one day be Moscow's only big energy customer.

Indeed, facing up to a future of near-total economic isolation was one of the few concrete policies in Mr Putin's speech, with a call for Russia's oil-dependent economy to produce more of its own food, medicine and technology. Yet living standards will have to plummet a long way before there is any threat to the established order.

For Mr Putin knows that just as in Soviet times, there is a large sections of Russian society – if not the intelligentsia – that will not complain too much, as long as pensions and benefits are paid, and as long as basic foods are available in the shops.

For example, when The Sunday Telegraph interviewed ordinary Russians last week about growing price rises, none blamed Mr Putin. And if they connected their hardships at all with the Western sanctions, they saw it as a worthwhile cost for restoring Russia's pride in Ukraine.

"Everyone is feeling the price rises," said Valentina, 61, who has just cancelled what would have been her first ever trip abroad, after the plunging rouble made even a trip to a cheap Turkish resort unaffordable.

"Why? Maybe it's because we have to help people in Ukraine, and we have to pay for Crimea now."

It is to such people that Mr Putin has proved such a successful salesman.

And when the product he offers is the restoration of Russia's imperial heyday – real or imagined – it seems some are willing to pay a very price indeed.