Flight from Russia.

WHEN Alexander Litvinenko was asked on his deathbed who was behind his poisoning, he fingered Vladimir Putin. While the dots linking Putin to the polonium poisoning will probably never be connected, Litvinenko's death is part of a pattern. Political opponents of Putin have had a terrible sequence of unfortunate events.

While Russia liberalized effectively under Boris Yeltsin, it began to head south in earnest on July 2, 2003, when Moscow police arrested Platon Lebedev, a principal shareholder in a holding company that was the majority owner of oil giant Yukos. On October 25 of that same year, Russian security agents arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky and placed him in prison. Khodorkovsky, who was outspoken politically, was ultimately put in a Siberian prison with a nine-year sentence. Yukos is now controlled by a Putin crony.

Lebedev and Khodorkovsky were hardly the only opponents of Putin to have a run of bad luck. Heroic journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot before she could get to the bottom of what appears to be a terrible scandal involving the Russian handling of Chechnya. Pro-Western Ukrainian leader Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin (and survived). Litvinenko's compatriot Dmitri Kovtun now also seems to have been poisoned.

While these human tragedies have played out, Russia has also behaved poorly toward Western multinationals. My colleague Leon Aron reported recently that "the Kremlin halted or threatened to halt operations" by a series of companies including Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, and Total. Aron adds that "it is an open secret in Moscow that the government's prime motive is to pressure the companies into either surrendering a share of production to the state or handing back their development licenses."

Russia is woefully underdeveloped given its human and natural resources. Its GDP per capita in 2005 was less than a third of Slovenia's, less than half that of Hungary, and only a smidgen above that of impoverished Romania. Russia is in desperate need of foreign resources to finance its development.

But the economic literature has shown that foreign capital flows to places that have a high level of economic freedom. Capital markets are a far more efficient deliverer of justice than any court. They punish dictators, and reward stability. Putin's actions should, the literature suggests, do enormous harm to the Russian economy.

While recent high oil prices may have given Russia some time, the nearby chart indicates that foreign capitalists have indeed taken note of Russian turmoil and headed for the exits. Foreign direct investment as a share of GDP, while remaining far below levels seen by other former Soviet-bloc countries, climbed steadily until 2003. Since 2003, it has plummeted. The turning point in the chart begins almost exactly when the Yukos affair began.

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This means that Russia is paying an enormous economic cost for Putin's thuggishness. Given the latest publicity, one should expect this trend to accelerate sharply. Without foreign capital flows, the Russian economy will stagnate, and Russians will fall farther and farther behind their neighbors. Russians are about to find out that corruption and cronyism look a lot like Communism.