But Mr. Putin’s line is just that  a line. In addition to tossing Mr. Khodorkovsky in jail on trumped-up charges, the Russian authorities also brought bogus tax claims against Yukos itself, shoving it into bankruptcy. Then the government created a dummy corporation to take over its assets, which it sold off, for far less than they were worth, to state-run oil and gas companies, primarily Rosneft, a poorly run company that is now the biggest oil producer in Russia.

“I have never witnessed a state steal such a large amount from investors,” said James A. Harmon, who, as president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States in the late 1990s, spent much of his time dealing with Russia. Said Edward Donahue, a Massachusetts accountant who had invested in Yukos: “They stole my investment,” Mr. Donahue was among a group of investors who tried to sue Russia to get their money back. (The case was thrown out of court.)

Even since the Yukos affair, corrupt Russian politicians and businessmen have routinely used arbitrary laws and regulations to grab assets that didn’t belong to them. Royal Dutch Shell was the majority partner in a group that included the state-owned monopoly Gazprom to develop a giant oil and natural gas field. Suddenly, in 2006, it ran into severe environmental and regulatory problems  problems that disappeared as soon as Shell ceded majority ownership to Gazprom.

A few years ago, BP was the controlling partner in a huge joint venture, amounting to 25 percent of its reserves, with a Russian company called TNK. TNK wanted to control the venture  so, naturally, BP suddenly had visa and other problems. Its business began to be disrupted. Robert Dudley, an American who was running the venture  and is now the chief executive of BP  had to flee the country and go into hiding for a time. Needless to say, the joint venture arrangements were rewritten.

Oil and gas companies aren’t the only ones running into government interference. A businessman who got the rights to redevelop the famous Hotel Moskva got into a commercial dispute with two of Mr. Putin’s allies. According to The Daily Telegraph in London, “he is now believed to be in hiding in California.”

One result of such tales, which are legion, is that many foreign companies that could help improve the Russian economy are leery of doing business there. In 2009, for instance, Ikea pulled the plug on a 1.4-million-square-foot mall it had developed  because it was tired of bumping into problems and delays that were caused by government officials looking for payoffs. This kind of petty corruption is a large part of the reason that Russia ranks 154th (out of 178 countries) on the global corruption perception index, compiled by Transparency International, an anticorruption organization in Germany.

Another consequence is that shares in Russian companies tend to trade at a severe discount compared with their peers in other countries. The Russian stock market, for instance, trades around 40 percent lower than other emerging markets. A few weeks ago, Russia’s deputy prime minister, Igor I. Sechin, complained that Rosneft was undervalued. “Compare the structure of Rosneft’s reserves and those of Petrobas” of Brazil, he said. “Rosneft is undervalued by around three times.” Well, yes, but whose fault is that?