NO sooner have the snows thawed in Nenets, just north of the Arctic Circle, than the tundra melts into a sandy swamp, swarming with voracious mosquitoes.
Even by Russian standards it is a harsh and desolate region, with a population of only 48,000 scattered over an area the size of England and Wales.
By midsummer, when the sun never sets, it feels like the end of the Earth.
But this eerily beautiful land of fishermen and reindeer herders is now the frontline of the Kremlin’s campaign to curb local democracy and seize control of Russia’s energy resources.
Somewhere beneath Nenets’ tundra and marshland lies an estimated 3.6 billion tonnes of untapped oil and gas reserves — enough to supply Britain for almost 20 years.
The Kremlin, or the dominant faction within it, wants to wrest control of this hydrocarbon pool, worth trillions of dollars, away from an autonomous-minded local administration.
Its tactics, however, raise grave concerns about President Putin’s commitment to democracy and free markets — the implicit criteria for membership of the G8, which holds its summit in St Petersburg next week.
In May, prosecutors flew into the region and arrested Aleksei Barinov, the popular governor of Nenets, on corruption charges.
It was a highly symbolic move. Mr Barinov was Russia’s last democratically elected governor, and the first to be arrested while in office.
Prosecutors accused him of embezzling funds from a company that he directed in 1999 to buy apartments worth 17 million roubles (£340,000). Hardly a soul in Nenets believes that was the real reason for his arrest.
Officials, NGO workers, journalists and ordinary citizens interviewed by The Times were all convinced that it was initiated by Kremlin officials with links to the oil industry.
Many of them said that the main beneficiary was Rosneft, the state oil giant at the heart of the Kremlin’s drive to turn Russia into an energy superpower. “Barinov was used as an example to other governors — they want an easily manipulated person here so they can share in the oil profits,” said Viktor Fumin, a member of Nenets’ parliament.
“Unfortunately, the current level of democracy allows such things to happen,” he said, adding that he had resigned from United Russia, the party backing Mr Putin, in protest.
A democratic system is not a formal precondition for membership of the G8, which grew out of informal meetings between the US, Europe and Japan to discuss the 1973 oil crisis.
In 1975, the world’s six major industrialised democracies, America, Britain, France, West Germany, Italy and Japan, agreed to meet annually in what was dubbed the Group of Six. Canada joined in 1976.
When Russia started attending some meetings in 1994, the group became known as the G7 plus 1.
Russia was formally admitted in 1997 in a move that the other members hoped would help speed the country’s transition to a Western-style democratic market economy.
Nine years on, however, Mr Barinov’s case suggests that Russia is heading in a different direction.
Even the basic facts of the case are hard to establish in the culture of secrecy that has arisen under Mr Putin, who is a former KGB officer.
Many of the main protagonists refused to be interviewed.
There is no doubt that Mr Barinov, a 55-year-old former oil man, is genuinely popular in Nenets.
He easily beat the Kremlin-backed candidate in an election in February last year, just before Mr Putin scrapped local polls and started directly appointing governors.
Since then, Mr Barinov had fiercely opposed a Kremlin plan to merge Nenets with the poorer neighbouring region of Arkhangelsk, which locals fear would decimate their budget.
He persuaded Lukoil, Russia’s largest private oil company, to invest 270 million roubles a year in social projects, building schools, roads and a sports stadium.
He was also locked in a bitter row with a subsidiary of Rosneft over 900 million roubles that he said it owed to the Nenets Government. Local officials said that several political and business figures might have wanted Mr Barinov removed. But they said that Rosneft stood to gain the most — and had the connections to make it happen. Its chairman is Igor Sechin, the deputy head of the Presidential Administration and leader of the faction of former security officials in the Kremlin.
“There’s definitely a fight going on and there are only two major oil companies here, Lukoil and Rosneft,” said Igor Norko, Mr Barinov’s deputy, who still works in the local administration. “Unfortunately for us, our region is very rich and whoever installs his team as head of the region has a lot to fight for.”
Other officials said that prosecutors who raided Mr Barinov’s offices had confiscated not only documents relating to his alleged crimes but also some relating to Lukoil’s current business.
Mr Barinov clearly has close links to Lukoil: he used to head one of its subsidiaries. Lukoil’s offices are a stone’s throw from the local administration in Naryan Mar, the capital of Nenets.
It controls an estimated 750 million tonnes of recoverable reserves across the region, according to the financial daily, Vedomosti. Rosneft, the paper said, had only 84 million tonnes.
Sergei Bogdanchikov, the president of Rosneft, announced in March that he wanted to expand in the region by bidding for licences to develop the potentially huge Trebs and Titov deposits. Rosneft, which is due to list in London next week, insists that it played no role in Mr Barinov’s arrest.
“We don’t do politics, we do business,” its spokesman, Nikolai Manvelov, said.
The Kremlin denies that there was anything political behind the case. “It’s a very convenient manner for those who are corrupted, to explain all issues by political persecution,” said Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s top political ideologue. Asked about Rosneft’s alleged involvement, he said: “It’s a lie.”
The Kremlin’s spin doctors portray the case as part of a drive to control the corruption and political chaos that took root in the 1990s under the previous President, Boris Yeltsin. Also in May, the Federation Council dismissed Sergei Sabadash, the representative from Nenets, and two other senators from Russia’s regions.
“Of course Barinov was corrupt,” said Vyacheslav Nikonov, a political analyst close to the Kremlin. “Everyone may be speeding, but if you’re the one sticking your head out of the window and calling the policeman a bitch, you’re going to get caught.”
Other analysts see Mr Barinov’s arrest as the latest example of Russian officials trampling over local democracy to promote the interests of the state companies they control.
Nikolai Petrov, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Centre, said that the case was designed to intimidate regional leaders before parliamentary elections next year and a presidential poll in 2008. “Barinov’s position became not so strong because of his conflict with Rosneft, represented by Sechin,” he said.
“They saw him as a person playing against them, who was not loyal enough. So when the time came to move against the regional leaders, they chose him as a target. They have now shown that they can put anyone behind bars.”
If that was the idea, it appears to have succeeded. Mr Barinov has been temporarily replaced and a permanent successor is likely to be appointed soon. People here say they have no illusions about Mr Barinov: no one gets ahead in Russian politics without getting their hands dirty. Many are still angered by the way the case was handled, their lack of control over the selection of a governor and the absence of independent media coverage.
Two years ago, Nenets had four television channels and four newspapers. It now has one of each, both state-controlled. Hundreds of residents joined protests against the arrest, an unusual act of defiance in this town of 14,000. A group of local NGOs has also sent a petition to the Public Chamber, a body set up by Mr Putin to act as the voice of civil society.
One NGO, Yasavei, has written to Mr Putin. It fears that he will appoint a governor who will support the proposed merger with Arkhangelsk. That, it says, would severely cut funds to support the lifestyle of the region’s 10,000 Nentsi, the reindeer herders who have lived here for thousands of years.
“Of course, it would be better for us to elect a person we know, than for the President to appoint someone we don’t know at all,” said Galina Platova, the executive director of Yasavei. “Unfortunately, when they made that decision, they didn’t ask the people if they liked it or not.”
