Outside, Russia was on the defensive. Sergei Lavrov, the Foreign Minister, barked at the West for not understanding his country's intervention in Georgia. Inside Moscow's cavernous LFK CSKA football training centre, though, it was a different story.

Russia was top dog.

Moscow International Dog Show at the weekend was a celebration of national pride. Forget the decadent Western breeds; it was the borzois, East European sheepdogs and Russian black terriers that were making the running.

Everybody wants one — they are the patriotic breeds.

The dog fair is the Russian equivalent of Crufts — “cruftski”, as one breeder called it — and at the weekend there were 198 breeds on show.

However, with the exception of one strikingly tall woman dripping jewellery, with a handbag-sized papillon in matching bling, it was not a glamorous occasion.

The exhibitors tried their best, attaching ear stiffeners to hunting dogs, slipping hand-knitted sweaters on shivering, hairless creatures, applying whitener to scrub out yellowish fur stains. But mainly it had the gritty atmosphere of a street market as breeders tried to pair off their prize-winning pooches.

Russia has become a land of dog-owners, with a third of households owning a canine of some kind. It has convinced itself that it has the capacity to be a world-beater.

Not since Laika the husky was ordered into the Sputnik in 1957 has there been such excitement about dogs. Even Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister, has a St Petersburg-bred black labrador called Connie. It tends to sniff visitors in embarrassing places.

Of course, the billionaire oligarchs are boosting the market for fashionable pedigrees; French bulldogs, in the case of some oil and gas tycoons, but increasingly the handsome Russian borzoi, the hunting dogs of the tsars.

The greatest borzoi-breeder of all time was Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, but the Bolshevik Revolution soon put an end to that: the dogs were slaughtered wholesale, denounced as aristocratic playthings.

Dogs crept back into favour, and during the nine-year war in Afghanistan in the 1980s Soviet officers returning home with booty brought carpets and Afghan hounds. “They became the basis for a whole strand of Aboriginal Afghan hunting dogs,” said Dmitri Voronin, a harried breeder trying to blow-dry his hound.

The climax of the show was an owner-dog dancing contest. “We have seen that Russian dogs are the most beautiful, now you will see that they are clever and well trained,” said the compère.

The winner was Olga, who had persuaded her dog to dance on its back paws while clutching a red rose in his teeth. She took home not only a gold cup, but also a huge bag of pet food, no doubt cooked up by a team of Russian scientists. “Everyone is a winner today,” said the compère.

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