You probably haven't heard of Krasnoyarsk. It's the engine room of the new Russia. And its governor is Alexander Khloponin. Abramovich may have the bigger toys and Putin the power, but this young Siberian oligarch is the face of things to come. By Brian Moynahan. Main photographs (see the newsprint edition): Simon Roberts

Alexander Khloponin is, on paper, another Roman Abramovich, but without the football club. He's one of the young men who made breakneck progress in the swirling and half-ruined world of Boris Yeltsin's fin-de-siecle Russia. His money comes from the country's natural riches, nickel and platinum, not oil and aluminium like Abramovich. He has the boys' toys, the boats and aircraft, if on a smaller scale. His Corby-built Fairline motor cruiser would fit as deck cargo on Abramovich's 282ft Ecstasea, and his Falcon jet takes 12 passengers, where the latter's Boeing 767, in its non-tycoon configuration at least, seats 240.

They each have a foot on the 'Londonograd' property ladder, though Khloponin's is a base for his daughter while she studies at the London School of Economics, rather than Stamford Bridge and a brace of mansions. They are almost the same age - Khloponin has barely turned 40; Abramovich was 39 last month - and both are governors of territories in the Russian immensity. It is here, in terms of future significance, and not crude cash, that there's a somersault.

The slice of the planet Khloponin governs, central Siberia, runs southwards for almost 2,000 miles (think London to Timbuktu), from Cape Chelyuskin, the northernmost point of the Eurasian landmass, a place of ice deserts and average winter temperatures of -36C, to the apple orchards of the south. It is a 'box of secrets that we're only just beginning to open', says Khloponin. As an exporter, it dominates the global markets for nickel and platinum group metals. It mines most of Russia's cobalt and copper, and much of its lead. It is in the top three in timber, hydro energy, coal and oil.

Its metals prices are booming - the new middle classes in China and India are sucking in nickel and copper for their bathrooms and plumbing as well as their factories - and it excites him. 'In Europe, the time of big development is over,' he says. 'No challenges, no adventures for the young. But here we're crazy to grow, for large projects. This is where the future lies.'

Not so Abramovich. Russia has already turned its back on several of the uber-oligarchs, those in the Abramovich league, who made billions from state assets obtained for a pittance. Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky are in exile. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, his Yukos oil empire stripped from him, is an inmate of YaG 14/10, an east Siberian prison camp.

Abramovich is governor of Chukotka, an impoverished territory polluted by atom tests on the very periphery of Russia, almost scraping Alaska. His term ran out this year, and he was not expected to seek a second. Governors are now appointed by the Kremlin, however, instead of by regional elections. He is being kept on in Chukotka at President Vladimir Putin's insistence, a move seen as less a compliment than a penance, to redistribute some of his spoils to needy Chukchis. It also shows that Putin is boss, and demands a show of social conscience.

His money stays - more of it than ever, after his recent $13 billion sale of Sibneft, an oil company he and Berezovsky bought for $100m 10 years ago - but his day in Russia is done. Mention Chelsea the length and breadth of Russia, and most respond with a wince and quiet fury. It is a reminder of the collapse and anarchy of the Yeltsin years, when it seemed that drunks and criminals were in the ascendancy and the oligarchs were stealing the country.

Khloponin, though, did not wheel and deal his way to the top. He worked his passage, and in the most brutal of places. In that lies his strength. He started in the comfort zone, as a young investment banker in a group that 10 years ago bought Norilsk Nickel (NN), a ramshackle mining giant. But he was soon running its polar mining town, Norilsk, north of the Arctic Circle, greeted by a furious, strike-happy workforce - the elite status and hardship pay of Soviet days corroded, their wages and pensions months late - who despised him as a Muscovite spiv.

The same bitter chalice awaited Putin when he came to power in 2000. The country had lost half its economy in eight years. Great lumps - the Ukraine, Georgia, the central-Asian republics - had been torn off its edges, losses still plaintively called the 'near abroad'. It had just been through a financial default. Almost half its people were living below the poverty line. The federal budget had shrivelled. Taxes, corporate and personal, went unpaid. Putin was saddled with social commitments and expectations inherited from Soviet days that were wildly beyond his means to meet. In turning Norilsk round, coping with its crises and helping to bind deep social wounds, Khloponin was tested in ways familiar to Putin, learning the management skills that Russia needs. And he has stayed on in Siberia - as a permanent resident, not an occasional visitor from SW3 - to become governor of Krasnoyarsk territory.

This is the great Siberian heartland on the Yenisey river, four time zones east of Moscow, but essential to the capital's brash prosperity, a key contributor to the federal budget and, so some are noting, Khloponin's potential launch pad for the Kremlin.

'In deep Siberia, a new sort of politician has emerged,' the political columnist Natalya Arkhangelskaya wrote of him. 'Note this name for the future.' Russia, she added, 'may not have to look far' for a successor to Putin in 2008.

'They call us the boys with the golden spoons now, the oligarchs,' Khloponin says, 'but I made my first money stonewashing blue jeans.'