Russia's new Prime Minister and would-be presidential successor, Victor Chernomyrdin, comes from the same Soviet stock as Boris Yeltsin. His re-emergence as the front-runner to succeed Mr Yeltsin dashes hopes of a change in outlook at the top of Russia's establishment.
Famously inarticulate and unimaginative, his one saving grace in the eyes of Russia's main political players - the regional leaders, bankers and energy barons - and the West, is that he is predictable. Better the sluggish conservative you know than the maverick nationalist you don't, seems to be the reasoning behind his comeback.
A Soviet apparatchik par-excellence, Mr Chernomyrdin (60) worked his way up from an oil refinery shop floor to the pinnacle of power and wealth via the state gas ministry, which he ran from 1985 to 1992. In 1989 he oversaw its transformation to Gazprom, Russia's biggest company, the largest gas company in the world, and now his powerbase.
When the outgoing prime minister, Mr Sergei Kiriyenko, attempted to undermine his predecessor last month, announcing the seizure of Gazprom's assets in retaliation over its refusal to pay billions in tax arrears, the counteroffensive was swift and effective. Within hours, Mr Chernomyrdin's friends in the media and in parliament had rallied to his support, condemning the attack on Gazprom as an attack on the state. When President Yeltsin's chief spokesman came down on Gazprom's side, the asset seizure was called off.
It was an impressive show of strength from a man written off as a spent force after his surprise dismissal in March. For Mr Kiriyenko, it was an early harbinger of his decline.
Whereas Mr Kiriyenko and his "young reformer" allies in government floundered in the company of the powerful energy barons and regional industrialists who stubbornly resisted encroachments on their power, Mr Chernomyrdin will again be in his element. He speaks their language - a combination of mumbled colloquialisms and utter filth - and is from the same preGorbachev culture of stagnation.
But the Chernomyrdin school of spin-doctoring leaves a lot to be desired. "We wanted it to be better but it turned out the way it always does," was his off-the-cuff apology for the botched currency reform of August 1993 which left millions with depleted savings.
Though seven years younger than President Yeltsin, Mr Chernomyrdin has similar health problems. He too had a multiple by-pass operation, conducted by the same cardiologist, Renat Akchurin, who led Mr Yeltsin's surgical team.
But he is clearly a much stronger man, with no known history of binge-drinking or depression. In an effort to reveal personality beneath the humourless exterior while standing in for the President during his prolonged heart illness and operation last year, Mr Chernomyrdin gave a rare televised glimpse of his private life, playing the accordion and admitting that he did enjoy the occasional tipple.
In his first term as prime minister from 1993 until last March, Mr Chernomyrdin established single digit inflation and a stable currency. But the roots of last week's rouble crash lie in his reliance on massive borrowing to fund the budget, his resistance to industrial restructuring, and his jealous protection of Gazprom and the energy sector as a whole.
There is little to suggest that Mr Chernomyrdin has learned from his mistakes.