Political ventures were common among financiers in the 1990s, but they were all but forbidden under the presidency of Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Putin ordered the arrest of the billionaire Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, at the time Russia’s richest man, and the media moguls Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris A. Berezovsky fled the country to avoid prosecution.

Mr. Artyomov said that there were frequent police raids on the National Reserve Bank in the 1990s, but that the last one had occurred in 2001. He said Russian authorities had changed their tactics in dealing with large businesses, promising “that there would be no more masky shows, that they will not try to terrify us.”

Yana Yakovleva, who was passing the site in her car on Tuesday morning, watched a column of young men “with the same short hair and needly eyes” emerge from black cars with tinted windows and head for the office building. “Ten years ago I would have said they were bandits,” she said. “Today, I realized right away that they are law enforcement officers.”

Ms. Yakovleva, an entrepreneur, was herself jailed in 2006 for selling a product without the necessary licenses. The charges against her were dropped, but she formed a nongovernmental organization to help jailed businesspeople and has documented dozens of such raids, though usually on businesses no one has ever heard of.

“The first primal feeling is simply fear,” she said. “All of a sudden 20 armed, aggressive men are rushing into your premises, and they treat you like a criminal  not a potential one, but a real one. There is a clear certainty that in any case, they’ll find something. In any case, you will be a criminal.”