Here’s an interesting article at Bloomberg on Putin’s plan to use the credit squeeze for his desired purposes. 
Putin May Use Credit Squeeze to `Destroy’ Oligarchs (Update1)
By Torrey Clark and Henry Meyer
Excerpt:
"Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000 vowing to destroy Russia’s oligarchs “as a class.” Within two years, he’d driven two into exile and imprisoned another.
Now, he may use the global markets meltdown to finish the job.
The $50 billion that the prime minister and President Dmitry Medvedev have pledged to lend cash-strapped companies will extend state control over business leaders. Billionaires seeking bailouts — including Oleg Deripaska, Russia’s richest man, and Mikhail Fridman — will have to give authorities veto power over their companies’ financing decisions.
“This will give the state more leverage over the country’s biggest companies and main industries,” said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at UralSib Financial Corp in Moscow. “In 2008, there is only one real oligarch: the state.”
All this marks a reversal from a decade ago, when oligarchs bankrolled Boris Yeltsin‘s almost-insolvent government. As recently as April, Russia’s 100 wealthiest citizens had a combined fortune equivalent to about a third of the economy, Forbes magazine estimated.
The nation’s 25 wealthiest businessmen have seen their worth shrink by $230 billion, or 62 percent, according to Bloomberg calculations. And Putin controls the strings on the biggest remaining purse — $531 billion in government reserves, which he is doling out through state-run Vnesheconombank, or VEB, where he presides as chairman of the supervisory board.
The oligarchs made their fortunes in the 1990s, as the government moved corporate ownership into individuals’ hands and state authority was weak. They subsequently loaned the government money to prop up Yeltsin in return for shares in choice assets, including OAO Norilsk Nickel, Russia’s biggest mining company. 
Their support didn’t prevent the government from defaulting in 1998 on $40 billion of domestic debt and devaluing the ruble. Putin came to power as president less than two years later with the help of Boris Berezovsky, a businessman and politician in Yeltsin’s inner circle who popularized the term “oligarch.” Berezovsky’s influence was chronicled in “Godfather of the Kremlin,” by Paul Klebnikov, the Forbes Russia editor slain in 2004…
Berezovsky, now 62, became an early victim of Putin’s anti- oligarch crusade. Berezovsky fled to London in 2001 in the face of Russian fraud charges he calls politically motivated. By the end of 2003, Putin had brought the nation’s business leaders to heel…"
…“The oligarchs are lobbying the government for access to state funds,” said Alexander Lebedev, 49, a billionaire who owns 30 percent of state-run airline OAO Aeroflot. “It’s not freely available to anyone who comes along.”
The attached strings are short. 
…The state’s growing sway over oligarchs extends beyond how they run their businesses. Putin and other top officials met individually with about 50 of the country’s wealthiest businessmen and ordered them “dump money into Russia’s financial system” to prop up the sinking stock market, says a report by Stratfor, a U.S.-based risk advisory group.
The initial injection of private funds, together with government measures sent the benchmark Micex Index almost 30 percent higher on Sept. 19 in a short-lived rally. Since then, the index has dropped 43 percent.
“Going after their personal finances, especially money they hold abroad, is a whole new level of control,” said Lauren Goodrich, a Stratfor analyst…"
Full article here.
