Back to the Future.

Sept. 12 started out like any other day for Sergey Kukura, the finance director of one of Russia's largest oil firms, LUKOil: he plunked down onto a soft leather seat in the back of his chauffeured automobile. But as his black Mercedes S600 headed toward his office and neared a railway crossing, two cars pulled alongside and forced it off the road. At least four men in camouflage jumped out wielding Kalashnikovs, handcuffed Kukura's driver and bodyguard, put sacks over their heads, then plunged needles of heroin into their arms. When the men regained consciousness hours later their mobile phones, car keys and the bodyguard's pistol was gone. So was their boss. He'd been hustled into a Volga with police license plates.

Late last week, exactly two weeks after the crime, somebody dumped Kukura near his home in broad daylight. The oil tycoon was so disoriented sources suggest somebody may have pumped him full of heroin as well. LUKOil denies that any ransom was paid for his release. As yet, authorities seem to have no clue who grabbed him. The case promises to end as mysteriously as it began.

Episodes like this might not have been as shocking in the old gangster days of Boris Yeltsin's newly post-Soviet Russia. But this is 2002, and Kukura is among the highest-ranking businessmen in the country. The president is supposed to be overseeing a sober, authoritarian and decriminalized New Russia, as some call it. But suddenly it's back to the bad old days of the "Wild East." Kukura's case is just one of a slew of recent incidents that seem to herald another open season on leading businessmen and politicians. The day after Kukura was kidnapped, an airport customs chief was fatally shot near his office. Duma parliamentarian Vladimir Golovlyov was assassinated on Aug. 21 while walking his dog in the woods near his home. Just the day before, the deputy head of the Moscow Railways had been gunned down in his neighborhood. Outside Moscow, the vice governor of the Smolensk region was shot seven times on Aug. 7, and elsewhere the deputy mayor of Novosibirsk (the second deputy mayor from the city to be killed in 11 months) was gunned down while leaving his parents' dacha on Aug. 26. And that's just to name a few.

Most Russians refuse to describe these killings were "political," even when the victims held elective office. Most believe the deaths (like Kukura's kidnapping) are linked to the same factors that drove the Wild East of old: the creation and frantic redistribution of wealth in the Putin era and, on a lesser scale, the settling of old feuds. Kukura, for instance, knows all about the financial dealings of LUKOil--a company that handles more than 20 percent of all of Russia's oil exports. And, with war looming in Iraq, there's no business that stands to yield more profit in Russia nowadays than oil. After Kukura's kidnapping, LUKOil issued a statement saying some of the information Kukura was privy to could be classified as "state secrets." The list of those with a possible interest in such information is long, from mafia gangs to business competitors to rogue security agents and feuding groups within LUKOil.

In other words, Russia hasn't changed as much in the past decade as many would have hoped, says Yuri Shchekochikhin, vice chairman of the Duma's Committee on Security. Pointing to the Audis and Mercedeses in the Parliament's parking lot, not to mention the lawmakers in tailored suits walking around with bodyguards, he notes the monthly salary of the typical deputy: about $300. "This Parliament is filled with 'businessmen'," he says. "Politics is just their krisha," or roof-- Russian slang ...