Mikhail Fridman

Net Worth: $ 5.2 billion

Primary Source: Alfa-Group , oil, telecommunications
Age: 40
Marital Status: married, two daughters

After growing up in the Ukrainian city of Lvov, Fridman came to Moscow to study at the Institute of Steel and Alloys in the 1980s. He founded Alfa Group in 1988 with a group of college friends. Now it's a diverse conglomerate with oil, retail, telecom and Russia's largest private bank. He has strong Kremlin connections, including a former subordinate who serves as President Vladimir Putin's chief political advisor. Last year he merged his oil company, TNK, with the Russian oil interests of BP, in an $18 billion deal--quite an achievement, considering that five years ago BP was in a bitter fight against what it claimed were Fridman's unorthodox methods in taking over a partly BP-owned oil field. But that's Fridman's style: aggressive, highly leveraged takeovers, followed by reorganization and then a sale to a strategic investor.

Vladimir Potanin

Net Worth: $ 5.4 billion

Primary Source: Norilsk Nickel (quote), metals
Age: 43
Marital Status: married, three children

A former Soviet foreign trade official, Potanin teamed up with banker Mikhail Prokhorov in 1992 to take over the assets of two Soviet-era foreign trade banks. Later he won control of metals giant Norilsk Nickel and oil company Sidanco in controversial loans-for-shares auctions. He served as deputy prime minister in charge of the economy in 1996-1997. He then partnered with George Soros to invest in telecom monopoly Svyazinvest, but sold Soros his stake after the two had a falling out. The devaluation of the ruble in 1998 forced the liquidation of his Uneximbank. He sold his oil interests to Mikhail Fridman's Alfa Group. His Interros holding company remains broadly diversified, with interests in metals, insurance, media, agriculture and engineering. Last year he bought the last remaining U.S. platinum and palladium producer, Stillwater Mining, for $255 million. Now paying attention to his social standing, he joined the board of the Guggenheim Museum in 2002.

Mikhail Prokhorov

Net Worth: $ 5.4 billion

Primary Source: Norilsk Nickel (quote), metals
Age: 39
Marital Status: bachelor

This Moscow State Financial Institute graduate worked in one of the big Soviet foreign trade banks and teamed up with Vladimir Potanin to take over the assets of two foreign trade banks being liquidated. The venture, later named Interros, grew through the 1990s to include metals, engineering, agriculture and media; since 2001, Prokhorov has been chairman of its most valuable holding, metals conglomerate Norilsk Nickel. he has a slightly larger stake than his longtime partner. A bachelor, Prokhorov is often featured in gossip columns about blow-out parties on the French Riviera. But then it's back to work at his metals plant on the Arctic Circle.

Viktor Vekselberg

Net Worth: $ 5.9 billion

Primary Source: TNK-BP, SUAL-Holding , oil, metals
Age: 47
Marital Status: married, son and daughter

The Ukrainian-born oil baron studied at the Moscow Institute of Railroad Engineering in the 1970s. He went into business in 1988, trading personal computers; he teamed up with former classmate who had emigrated to the U.S. in 1989. He led Russia's first successful hostile takeover in 1994, when his Renova firm took control of the Vladimir Tractor Factory and installed a Russian-born Harvard M.B.A. to run it. Later he bought medium-size aluminum smelters and bauxite mines, united them into the $1 billion (sales) SUAL Holding in 1996; now selling a 25% stake to a foreign investment group. But Vekselberg made the bulk of his fortune when he teamed up with Mikhail Fridman's Alfa Group to take over TNK, Russia's third-largest oil company, in 1997-1999. Last year TNK merged with the Russian operations of BP, giving Vekselberg and other TNK owners $6.35 billion in cash and BP stock. In February, he bought the Forbes Faberge collection for an undisclosed sum and returned it to Russia.

Roman Abramovich

Net Worth: $ 12.5 billion

Primary Source: Sibneft, Russian Aluminum (quote), oil, metals
Age: 37
Marital Status: Married for the second time, five children

Abramovich lost his parents as a child, dropped out of college and then made a fortune in a series of controversial oil export deals in the early 1990s. His fortune really took off in 1995 when he teamed up with Russia's most powerful crony capitalist, Boris Berezovsky, to take over oil giant Sibneft at a fraction of its market value. When Berezovsky fled Russia in 2000 to escape fraud charges, he sold out to Abramovich. Now, besides Sibneft, Abramovich has interests in aluminum, TV and automobiles--all held by British-registered Millhouse Capital. He is spending his fortune conspicuously, including $400 million to buy London's Chelsea football club and some of the world's best players.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Net Worth: $ 15.2 billion

Primary Source: Yukos (quote), oil
Age: 40
Marital Status: Married for a second time, four children

Russia's richest person has tried his hand at a number of trades. He has worked as a carpenter, an official in the Komsomol (the Soviet Communist Party's youth organization) and as deputy head of the Russian Fuel and Energy Ministry. In 1995, his Menatep group bought control of oil giant Yukos at a fraction of its market value. Khodorkovsky has also made waves with his pen: In 1992, he co-authored (with Leonid Nevzlin, No. 18 in our list) a book titled Man With a Ruble, in which he called on Russians to come to terms with the rise of the new rich. As the Kommersant newspaper wrote at the time: "The book presents entrepreneurs as the driving force of the economy, the foundation of the state and the guarantors of society's well-being." Twelve years later, after being arrested on charges of fraud and tax evasion, Khodorkovsky picked up the pen again, publishing an essay, "The Crisis of Liberalism in Russia," in which he wrote: "For many (though certainly not all) of our entrepreneurs who made their fortunes in the 1990s, Russia is not their native country. It's just a wide-open hunting ground." Such penitence has not helped Khodorkovsky to hang on to his fortune. Since his arrest in October 2003, Khodorkovsky's net worth has dropped thanks to a decline in Yukos' capitalization.