Two years ago, Russia’s deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin, wrote in an editorial that many in the West would be happy to see Mr. Putin fall, including Ms. Albright, who was, he said, dreaming of Siberia’s riches.

An article in Pravda the same year noted that “the scandalous phrase ‘Siberia is too large and rich to belong to one country,’ ” had been attributed to Ms. Albright. Although “the source of such a declaration has not yet been found,” the author Paul Chernyshev added, “this does not make her a friend of Russia.”

In October, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai P. Patrushev, said in an interview with the government-owned newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta that “many American experts, in particular former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, assert that there are vast territories ‘under Moscow’s power’ that it is incapable of exploiting and which therefore ‘do not serve the interests of all humanity.’ ”

Without citing any specific source, Mr. Patrushev continued, “Assertions continue to be heard about the ‘unfair’ distribution of natural resources and the need to ensure so-called ‘free access’ to them for other states.”

According to an investigation by a former Moscow Times correspondent, Anna Smolchenko, the idea that Ms. Albright was jealous of Russia’s natural resources can be traced to a December 2006 interview with Boris Ratnikov, a retired major general from the Russian secret service. General Ratnikov told Rossiyskaya Gazeta that his colleagues in the service’s secret mind-reading division had read Ms. Albright’s thoughts in 1999, just before the United States-led military intervention in Kosovo that she had championed.