Don't worry, Shimmer, there will always be places to get caviar and blinis in NYC
Let's see, there's Caviar Russe, Caviarteria, Petrossian, Firebird, Russian Samovar ... and if you go to Brighton Beach (just next door to Coney Island) there are many Russian nightclubs and restaurants where you can get the whole deal, for less money!!
Actually RTR was around for quite a long time, in the restaurant time-line. Before Warner Leroy bought it and redid the whole interior, it had been closed for severa years. Faith Stewart Gordon, who owned it before, wrote a book about it. I remember going there a couple of times, once in my teens (I had Karski Shashlik [lamb chops] and Lodichka [a chocolate "little boat" filled with mousse]) and another time in my early 20s (Chicken Kiev and Kissel (cranberry compote over farina).
I had not been since it was redone, for many reasons. It was a gorgeous place before, even when it was getting seedy. Look for the scene in "Tootsy" where Dustin Hoffman interrupts his agent at lunch there -- still an impressive place. But since it reopened, it was just not considered good enough to compete with so many other places. Sad, yes, but such is the life-cycle of a restaurant.