Of my four old diplomatic stamping grounds - France, America, Russia and China - the last two were dead countries that have since sprung to life. The wittiest remark on Soviet Russia was by Louis-Ferdinand Céline after a visit in the Thirties: "une catastrophe qui végète". There is no outward sign of mouldering now, or (except from some overstretched oligarchs) of catastrophe.

"Engagement" has always been the recommended foreign policy towards Russia, and as a broody chill falls on our relations my own family are doing their bit. My daughter, Celia, writes for Russian Vogue. My son Francis, a jazz saxophonist who (more accomplished than his one-time drumming dad) plays for Amy Winehouse and went for the party inaugurating the new Mrs Abramovich's contemporary art gallery. My wife Sarah went for the translation of her book The Ravished Image, a critique of the overcleaning of pictures (foreword by Sir Ernst Gombrich, much revered in Russia). Her hope is that it will help prevent their prudently conserved Old Masters looking as scraped and parched as ours. And I go there three times a year to chair the Russian Booker Prize, the biggest fiction award in the land.

As a regular visitor, I track the progress of the New Russians closely. The tone is more and more what you would historically expect: a search for respektabelnost, a word whose appropriation tells its own tale. The opposite is khamstvo, a derivation of ham, as in acting, meaning boorishness.

As a result, pseudo-criminal argot among the new possessor classes is out and a more lordly locution in, as in the vogue expression po liubomu, meaning roughly "whatever" in its airiest mode. The Lamborghini with raspberry jerkin and new white trainers is similarly frowned on, stylistically replaced by lumpish retro furniture at non-retro prices. Even the expensive-looking tarts in the bar of the five-star hotel where I stay seem more decorously behaved, sitting stoically over their tea awaiting their catch for the night - a Geordie project manager, a trader from the Caucasus, or a hot-rod German financier, all likely to bargain the poor girls down as market retribution strikes. Maybe the ranks of fleshly sin will have thinned by my next visit.

No sign of decline in the cost or luxury of restaurants. At a fish place stylish beyond anything I have seen in London I was entrusted with selecting the wine; the cheapest I could find was a very ordinary Italian white at £55. Generally wine in Moscow is what philosophers call a category mistake: vodka and beer are best, and nowadays every brand of the latter is available.

At another place, a brand new 18th-century chateau dripping gilt (it cost $50m), hard-faced men and molls were served by liveried waiters and entertained by powdered-haired Baroque musicians. The name of this surreal installation was Turandot and the cuisine Chinese, obviously.

I note that, like Putin, President Medvedev has been stumping around Siberia and the Far East demanding faster development and scorching official ears. Russians are hag-ridden by the rise of China, though stories of mass, clandestine immigration are hugely exaggerated. Not enough attention is paid to the future of Chinese-Russian relations, something I try to rectify in my new book, China: a Wolf in the World?. For the time being, however, the truth is more human, and I hear more stories about a novel form of cross-border co-operation: between Chinese men who, due to the one-child policy, face a shortage of women, and Russian girls who are short of eligible, sober, entrepreneurial Russian males.

The Russian Booker shortlist was announced to a crowded, deferential press conference. As in most recent years there is nothing political; after all those 19th-century social preachers and decades of socialist realism Russians seem to have had their fill of finger-wagging. Instead there is some fanciful stuff, including a book about a rejected Soviet-era manuscript that resurfaces and turns out to have magical powers. Bulgakov is with us yet.

I am struck by the tone of the chief judge, a literary academic who is at pains to avoid ad-speak in discussing the state of the novel. He even quotes his homologue at this year's British Booker (Michael Portillo), who claimed it had been yet another wondrous year for English prose. I'm not going to say that of our year, declares our frowning Russian. Thirty years ago people in his position would proclaim the country's glorious artistic triumphs ad nauseam, much as governments and the arts industry do in Britain today. Strange to reflect that the Russians have sobered down while British boosterism in the arts can now sound like Soviet propaganda. "Long Live the Creative Genius of the Soviet People" would hardly be out of place, suitably adapted, at the offices of the Arts Council.