It is the election season in Russia, with the parliamentary election coming in December and the presidential vote scheduled for next March. Arresting a highly visible oligarch and stripping him of his oil company plays well with the Russian public, who have not yet gotten rid of the Soviet-era notion that business is synonymous with thievery, the WSJ reports.

However, the true reasons behind the attack on Mr. Khodorkovsky are more complicated as well as more sinister. They go to the core of what kind of society post-Soviet Russia has become, and who is the master in the land, the newspaper says.

According to it, Russia is a rentier state, which lives off the extraction and sale of its oil, gas, metals and other natural resources. Although Soviet-era industrial plants are producing once more, an appreciating ruble is starting to expose their lack of international competitiveness - highlighted this week by the World Economic Forum report that shows Russia dropping to 70th place (from 64th) in its business competitiveness ranking. The old edge in science and technology is gone, as top-level researchers have left the country. Even Russia's armaments industry cannot hold on to its markets. Russian military hardware has to be upgraded with Western European and Israeli electronics to find clients even in the developing world.

Raw materials are thus Russia's only niche in the world economy. And, just as its 1998 default was largely the result of low oil prices, so its current bout of prosperity stems from high oil prices prevailing over the past few years. There are different ways to divvy up the natural rent that accrues to nations fortunate enough to have natural resources on their sovereign territory. Norway and Alaska spread their oil revenues liberally among their citizens in a system that suspiciously resembles socialism. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, exemplifies the feudal stage in history: its oil wealth belongs to the House of Saud, whence it trickles down to its sundry vassals.

In Russia, many ordinary people believe that the natural rent is distributed unfairly. In their view, it goes to a handful of oligarchs, who fraudulently bought up natural resource companies in the early 1990s. This is why attacks on oligarchs are so popular. However, while the oligarchs are obviously wealthy, they are not the main recipients of Russia's natural rent. The bulk of oil and gas revenues go to Russia's extensive government bureaucracy.

In Russia, the old Soviet-era bureaucracy not only remains in place, but it has been the main beneficiary of the economic reforms of the past decade. It expanded by nearly 15 percent in the second half of the 1990s, even as the overall population declined. The number of employees at various government agencies now totals some one-tenth of the population.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky became an integral cog in this corrupt machinery. For over a decade, every Russian oligarch has been feeding a small army of officials - all those who issued permits to set up private banks in the early years of reforms, signed off on cheap government loans and sold off resource companies for a fraction of their actual worth. But once Mr. Khodorkovsky learned more about business, he and the bureaucrats parted ways. Milking the cash flow at YUKOS may be lucrative, but it doesn't create true wealth, whereas by making his company honest and transparent an oligarch can realize billions on the stock market. At the same time, transparency and accountability precludes slush funds for paying protection and grease money to officials.

A genuinely transparent company can only exist in a transparent society. So, Mr. Khodorkovsky soon found himself funding various causes that promoted openness in society at large. That was something the New Class certainly could not tolerate, the WSJ says. There is a larger issue at play here, too. The experience of other countries where natural rent accrues to state officials - such as Venezuela and Mexico - suggests that it is far easier for bureaucrats to lay their hands on the money if natural resources belong to them - i.e., to the state. Vladimir Putin has sought to reassure other oligarchs, domestic public opinion and Western investors by stating that the early 1990s privatization will not be rolled back. This is probably true, but what he meant was that those reforms that allowed private ownership in the industrial and retail sectors are safe.

On the other hand, it now seems a foregone conclusion that oil, metals and other natural resources will be re-nationalized in the coming years - just as YUKOS suffered a de-facto nationalization Thursday. The pattern has already been tried out, over the past two years, on two disgraced oligarchs, Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Gusinsky. After YUKOS, the rest of the natural resource companies will be picked of one by one, and in each case the target of the expropriation will be punished for some transgression, real or imagined.