The circulating idea about Alexander Pushkin's being no less responsible for the violence and crimes that Ruᛋᛋia indulges in than Putin is indeed deep and full of truth.
Varlam Shalamov was among the first to show that the Russian literature was full of rot and bigotry, and that the moral authorities like Leo Tolstoi and so on made it exactly like that. Cf. his comment about Russian Literature being utterly unable to give a true portrayal of a Russian criminal.
I would characterise the current Russian elites as the criminals that have exploited this very vulnerability in the cultural code. Living by truth and mutual agreement is good only to the point where the truth one lives by becomes a truth of ‘urkas’, and the mutual agreement accepts the form of ‘ponyatia’.
Basically, beyond a few GULAG writers, no one has ever warned the Russian masses about the criminal code of conduct being much more detrimental to their being than the most obtuse and heartless bureaucratic one.
After Prigozhin's mutiny, Ruᛋᛋia has returned to the state of the obscene lawlessness, where the word of a ‘pakhan’, that is of a gang leader, simply negates any kind of law or any semblance of law altogether. And given the warm reception the Wagnerites received at Rostov-on-Don, the perspectives of that society are less than bright.