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Advertisements for Russia's biggest oil company, Yukos, show a rocket blasting off. But these days an exploding rocket might be more appropriate. Yukos and the company's chairman, 40-year-old billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky -- by Forbes's account Russia's richest man -- are the subjects of a legal crackdown that seems to have the backing of the Kremlin. The campaign targeting Khodorkovsky and the company has Western analysts worried that Russia is backsliding into the kind of Byzantine power struggles of the 1990s that plagued the budding democracy. It all started July 2 when Platon Lebedev, a close associate of Khodorkovsky and the...

<p>LONDON — Three years after fleeing Russian President Vladimir Putin's attack on him and his businesses in Moscow, Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky loiters in his manicured Surrey garden, watching history apparently repeat itself in Russia.</p> <p>In the past month, his fellow oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of Yukos — Russia's largest oil company — became a target of Mr. Putin's conflict with the oligarchs. In what is widely seen as an attempt to curb their political influence, Mr. Khodorkovsky's deputy was arrested and Yukos' offices were raided by masked police. Mr. Khodorkovsky's response was to announce that he will steer clear of politics until 2007.</p>

The Kremlin-Yukos conflict, almost a month old now, has shaken the conventional wisdom many had come to accept about the Vladimir Putin presidency. In a nutshell, the standard interpretation before this happened was the following: Putin's 2000 agreement with the oligarchs called for strengthening the state without big business getting overly involved in politics. In turn, the state would not meddle too much in the affairs of the business empires - basically, in the Russian economy. Of course, there are many nuances, but, essentially, the Yukos fracas has put this 'social contract,' as it were, into question. Eventually, most likely...

KIROVSK, Murmanskaya Oblast - The 30,000 inhabitants of this Arctic town in the middle of the vast Kola Peninsula pride themselves on being happy and hospitable. There are reasons for this: For an industrial town, the multicolored buildings look refreshingly pristine and the view is panoramic, especially this time of year, when the sun always hangs in the sky, except for an occasional dip behind the barren and breathtaking Khibiny mountains. But life hasn't always been so idyllic. Like hundreds of other outcroppings in Stalin's gulag system, Kirovsk was designed as a labor camp of death and detainment. It is...

The arrest on July 2 of Platon Lebedev, a top executive of Group Menatep and Yukos Oil, has created uncertainty not only about Russia's largest petroleum producer but also about whether the country has shaken off the legacy of its past. Denied release after more than three weeks in prison, Mr Lebedev, a Russian billionaire, is accused of not paying enough for a fertiliser plant in 1994. The authorities also arrested the head of Yukos's security department, raided Yukos's offices with masked and armed men and ordered an investigation of Yukos for seven other cases of murder, attempted murder, tax...

If you want to predict the future of any conflict, find out who is sponsoring it. Terrorism, revolutions and civil wars require large investments. To become a real threat, popular discontent must be used by members of the social elite. Vladimir Lenin once said that for his cause he could take money from Satan himself. Satan was Germany, with whom Lenin concluded a deal: In exchange for the sponsoring of the Bolshevik revolution, he promised, in case of victory, to sign with Germany a separate peace agreement, ceding to it a huge part of Russian territory and betraying Russia's allies...