There is an atmosphere of unease in Moscow. Three high-profile contract killings in a fortnight, including Anna Politkovskaya, the courageous reporter of Novaya Gazeta. People are wondering who will be next.

A journalist friend from Novaya Gazeta told me: “People are afraid it’s the beginning of a series of killings.” She was late for work, and the paper called up to check nothing had happened to her.

Vladimir Putin said the killing of Politkovskaya was the work of “fugitives from Russian justice, who will sacrifice anyone to create a wave of anti-Russian sentiment”. That sounds to me very much like he’s pinning the blame on Boris Berezovsky.

Chris Weafer, chief strategist at Alfa Bank, says: “Well, there’s always a theme to elections. Maybe the theme this time is to get Berezovsky. I wouldn’t discount it”.

Weafer makes a good point. We are now beginning the run-up to the 2008 election and, as analysts have predicted, it looks like it will be a violent and dangerous approach, just like it was in 2000.

Back then, we remember, the campaign kicked off with the Moscow apartment bombings, which killed 300 people, and led directly to the second Chechen war. That war, in turn, helped transform Putin from a faceless technocrat to a defender of the Russian people (at least in the electorate’s eyes).

This time around, we are seeing a different type of war, an economic war against migrants. It’s too early to say if the events of the last two weeks are the start of a concerted electoral campaign or merely some bureaucrats getting carried away after the face-off with Georgia.

But it seems to be classic Putin politics – you close down Rodina for peddling anti-immigrant politics in an election, then peddle the same electoral politics yourself.

Are the contract killings part of some official settling of scores before the election? I don’t think so. They seem to me part of something altogether more worrying – a sign that Putin’s tight grip on power may be slipping, that he is becoming a lame duck, and that opposing clans, criminal groups and political forces are no longer afraid to take their fights out into the streets.

There is so much at stake in the next elections – the commanding heights of the Russian economy are up for grabs, just like last time. Putin’s men have taken up seats at many of the biggest and most influential companies in the country – Gazprom, Rosneft, Vneshtorgbank, Rosoboronexport, Channel One, Atomprom, Russian Railways, Bank Rossiya.

But there’s no guarantee they will keep those seats. Just look at what happened to Berezovsky, Gusinsky, Rem Viakhirev and Khodorkovsky the last time a new president came to power.

Any power change involving so many trillions of dollars is bound to involve a few bodies in the boots of cars.

One person who seems to have decided enough is enough is Andrei Illarionov, the former economic advisor to the Kremlin, who has announced he is off to Washington to join the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank.

One source told me he was leaving partly out of fears that he could be next on a hit-list.

I find this unlikely. I’ve interviewed Illarionov twice, and the impression I got was of someone who loved foreign media attention, but who didn’t play a significant role in the politics of his country. His successor, Arkady Dvorkovich, seems much more of a heavy-weight to me.

I also came to think of Illarionov as a person so dogmatically liberal he was completely unsuited to politics. This, we recall, was the man who once compared the Kyoto protocol to Auschwitz, because it went against his precious ‘free market principles’. Global warming be damned, we must adhere to the free market, even as the ocean’s waters rise around us!

He has found his spiritual home, perhaps, at the Cato Institute. The institute came and held a conference in Moscow last year, which I found very amusing. It was all these bookish old men in bow-ties and tweed jackets saying ‘Of course free market liberalism can flourish in Russia. Why, on the way from the airport, I saw a whole raft of advertising billboards’. Beware of any foreign commentators whose commentary begins with ‘on the way from the airport’…

The depressing thing about Illarionov’s appointment, for me, is that it seems to underline the fact that Russian thinkers (if Illarionov can be termed that) seem inevitably to tend either towards authoritarianism or libertarianism, both of which seem equally ill-suited to deal with the modern world.

While Illarionov heads off to the US, more and more Russian shareholders are planning a fast exit to London, by way of an IPO. Alfa Bank estimates that around 80 IPOs are set to occur in the next 15 months, with Russian companies hoping to raise around $18 billion.

Natalia Orlova, chief economist at Alfa Bank, says: “The next 12 months are the last window when Russian companies can do an IPO, before the political risk of the presidential elections, and the falling oil price, make it impossible.”

But these companies might find it harder than they think. The changing global economic environment means much less money is being put into emerging markets than they were at the start of the year. In fact, $20 billion has been pulled out of emerging market funds since May, when the Morgan Stanley emerging market index fell 200 points.

There are signs now that many of these IPOs might be delayed. Yesterday, Uralkali, Russia’s biggest producer of manure, shelved its IPO plans, when it became clear the market valuation of it was below the shareholders’ expectations. Apparently, investors decided the company was little more than a big pile of s***.

Julian Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

October 13, 2006