Their origins
Some of the Oligarchs began business under Gorbachev, when small co-operatives - living cheek-by-jowl with the black marketeers of the underground economy and the protection-rackets of the Mafia - were first permitted. Mikhail Friedman, now head of the powerful Alfa Group, started out with a theatre-ticket agency and a group of window washers; ex-mathematician Boris Berezovsky (Aeroflot, television, auto-production) in car-sales; Roman Abramovitch started out making rubber ducks: spotted by Beresovsky, he became his financier before moving on to bigger things.

Others were well-placed government insiders. Vladimir Potanin (banking, gas, oil, nickel, real estate), for instance, was a Communist-Party functionary involved in the regulation of foreign trade. His father was a member of the Party's Central Committee; and he himself went on to become a deputy prime minister - a position he used to privatise, for himself (and George Soros, whom he later double-crossed), the country's telephone system.

Lift-Off
Gorbachev, as a reformer, was cautious and slow. But in 1991, after an attempted coup against him, he and the Party he headed were swept away, and the Soviet Union he'd presided over became history. Yeltsin - brave, ignorant, confused - now took centre-stage; and the Oligarchs finally came into their own. They acted as Yeltsin's ministers and key advisers; they financed his election campaigns, and made loans to his central treasury.

And as the farce of Russian privatisation began, they were rewarded with amnesties from tax arrears; freedom to operate however they wanted; and the right to buy state-controlled companies - via rigged auctions organized by Yeltsin's daughter and privatisation minister Anatoly Chubais (now boss of Unified Energy Systems and an Oligarch himself) - at knock-down prices.

Khodorkovsky, for instance, is said to have picked up Yukos for a derisory $162 million. Even before the recent deal with Abramovich's Sibneft, it was worth about $15 billion. Other of his confreres are also emerging onto the world stage as major players. Mikhail Friedman and Victor Veselberg, recently signed away 50% of oil company TNK to British Petroleum in return for $6.8 billion in cash and shares.

But two of the Oligarchs - Boris Berezovsky (the so-called Godfather of the Yeltsin Kremlin) and Vladimir Gusinsky (ex-theatre director; with major holdings in finance and construction) - are now in exile, hounded out of the country by President Putin because of their opposition to him and their stakes and influence in television and the media.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky exemplifies the janus like future awaiting the oligarchs. On the one hand he has created the fourth-biggest oil company on earth, signed a deal for a major pipeline to China, bought shares in Western prospecting and supply companies and in the Danish engineering giant, Kvaerner. Swayed by friendship with Jacob Rothschild, he financed the Hermitage Rooms in London's Somerset House; made large contributions to the US Library of Congress; and set up the €10-million Open Russia Foundation, with Henry Kissinger, Senator Bill Bradley and Rothschild, among others, as trustees.

None of this helped him, when he decided to speak out against President Putin - he is now facing a 10-year jail term on charges of corruption and incitement to murder, is held in miserable conditions, and after a bizarre game of pass the parcel, where ownership of his company was transferred fleetingly to Israel, and then to Britain and Rothschild, is now having to sell off large chunks of his company to the government.

End Game
From their first legalised involvement in the black economy, then, and their irruption into a world traditionally controlled by the Russian Mafia, the Oligarchs have risen - via careers that variously involve money-laundering, illegal offshore-banking, asset-stripping, embezzlement, outright shareholder-swindling and even murder - to overwhelmingly dominant positions in the Russian economy. They now seem set fair to repeat their success in the West, taking on the mantle of the Astors and Rockefellers.

Key to their rise is a hidden story in which Britain has played the significant part. It is no coincidence that Boris Beresovsky has chosen exile in Chris Evans' former mansion in Haslemere, that Roman Abramovich should have used both his money - and reportedly President Yeltsin's - to buy Chelsea FC, and is now learning polo at his Surrey mansion. Beresovsky has long had a tangled relationship with MI6. Three London banks brokered the Chelsea deal. And Jacob Rothschild is a frequent and unlikely visitor to Stamford Bridge.

But Rothschild is the tip of a much less savoury iceberg. The Square Mile (City of London) has been quick to capitalise on the deal-making opportunities of the new Russia. Some of the less scrupulous banks have also been speedy to move the oligarchs' cash away from the Kremlin's view via a chain of obscure and often unlicensed boiler plate operations.

Khodorkovsky is the richest of them all. As his relationship with the Kremlin worsened, so his managing director sprang into action - an apparently mild-mannered accountant from Wantage. Stephen Curtis first ensured that all the profits from his boss' oil sales were banked offshore - they were then moved via Riggs bank of Dallas, the Isle of Man - and fleetingly a holding company controlled by Rothschild into apparently secure bank accounts in London.

But as the war with the Kremlin intensified, so Curtis started to become more and more concerned about his fate. He rang the police and Security services offering to trade information: he took to disguising his voice, and appearance. Then, a month ago his helicopter crashed into the tarmac at Bournemouth airport. There has yet to be any hard evidence of malfeasance, but the Dorset police have stated they regard his death as suspicious.

For the cloud that hangs over the oligarch's future is the deepening resentment their enormous wealth inspires. That, and a common religion, are useful sticks for President Putin to beat them with.

Even the wily Abramovich knows that he may have to strike a deal with Putin to avoid the fate of Khodorkovsky, banged up in jail, or indeed the increasingly bizarre exile of Beresovsky. Beresovsky is holed up in Mayfair writing incoherent rants against the Russian government, while consoling himself with the latest blond. Over the coming year, the endgame will play itself out - do they need Russia, more than Russia needs them? These are going to be interesting times for some of the richest men in the world.

The Future
There are signs that the Oligarchs, in addition to entrenching their position and cleaning up their act, are preoccupied with making Russia a safe and suitable environment for doing business. From jail, Khodorkovsky has poured vast amounts of money into computer education across the country, and he's also founded a bizarre version of the Western Scout Movement which gives the young a grounding in the Internet, the mechanics of capitalism and the value of social projects. A number of other Oligarchs have entered politics. Abramovich is now governor of Chukotka District in the far north-east.

But, what is not clear overall is how far the Oligarchs, having bludgeoned their way to control of the economy, chafing at the slow rate of change in Russia, now propose ultimately to take over its government - and, more importantly whether the government is going to let them.