At the heart of every small enterprise is a dream, and Ilya Smirnov’s is crazier than most. Right now that dream is dying. The state of his business — Kotissimo, Moscow’s biggest cat cafe — resembles one of his feline recruits named Kostik, a shaggy gray and white beauty hit by a car that left him with just one eye and a useless, mangled jaw.

“He’s a very optimistic cat, and very friendly,” said Smirnov, who could be describing himself. He took out bank loans for $27,000 to start the popular business three years ago. Smirnov’s cafe — and potentially thousands of businesses across Russia — was hit by a double-barreled catastrophe: covid-19 lockdowns and the collapse in oil prices, a crisis for Russia’s energy-dependent economy.

President Vladimir Putin’s oil-price war with Saudi Arabia only sharpened the pain, leading to a humiliating reversal when Russia reached a deal last month with OPEC members and others to cut production. Yet Putin seems oddly aloof from the disaster sinking small and medium enterprises in Russia that constitute up to a quarter of the economy. He faces what many political analysts describe as his greatest domestic challenge since returning to the presidency in 2012.

But he appears detached, holed up at his country estate and content to delegate the business of saving the economy to lower-level officials. It’s a paradoxical image for a man whose main political message is that Russia needs him in office until 2036.

“This is an unprecedented shock,” said economist Sergei Guriev, professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and former chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. “Oil prices are at a level that Putin has never seen, so it’s something completely new. Then you have the pandemic, then you have the economic crisis, which is also domestic, not just because of the oil prices.”

Putin designated the coronavirus self-isolation period as extra paid vacation for workers, putting a burden on small-business owners who also face rent and loan payments with no income. Smirnov, a former business development manager, wrote to his landlord, seeking to delay his $4,000 monthly rental bill for the airy cafe set up to look like someone’s home. “But I don’t expect a miracle,” he said.

Although they run Kotissimo as a business, he and his wife are happy when they break even. Their driving passion is the cats. The cafe saved 250, finding homes for 180.

“Every cat has a unique story. Seryosha has an absolutely humanlike face. He has charisma, but he can bite. Moona is our Monday face. Every Monday we post her picture because her face says it’s Monday. She always looks angry. Barsya is one of the most intellectual cats I have ever seen.­ . . . ” Smirnov was just getting started.