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Alexander Lebedev, a former-KGB-agent-turned-oligarch, may have lost almost two thirds of his multibillion-dollar fortune during the recent economic crisis in Russia, but his swagger is still intact. "We are talking mostly about paper losses," scoffs the 50-year-old, silver-haired Lebedev, clad in jeans and sneakers during an early autumn interview at his headquarters, a 19th-century villa perched at a bend on the Moscow River.

Except for a barely profitable showing by his National Reserve Bank in the first half of this year, Lebedev acknowledges that red ink has soaked the rest of his far-flung businesses — including two airlines, a five-star resort in Ukraine, Russian farmland, newspapers in Moscow and London, various construction and real estate projects and a few investments in telecommunications and oil extraction.

Just how badly all of these ventures are faring, Lebedev won’t say. But according to Forbes his fortune has shrunk from $3.7 billion at the beginning of 2008 to $1.3 billion this year. He saved his single largest investment, a 28 percent stake in Russia’s state-controlled airline, Aeroflot, with refinancing from his own bank, NRB. And this summer, Lebedev fired the top managers of the National Reserve Corp., his 85 percent–owned holding company, claiming their expense accounts were bloated and that "they were behaving like state bureaucrats." NRC’s 2008 annual report, which should have been ready by June, hadn’t been published by October.

Lebedev and his fellow oligarchs have unquestionably been walloped by the crisis: According to Russian business magazine Finans , the 25 richest oligarchs collectively lost more than $220 billion in 2008. Many were forced to beg the Kremlin to compel state banks to extend bailout loans to their empires, spawning widespread derision. "The current joke is that oligarchs no longer really own their enterprises, they are only allowed to borrow them," says Anders Åslund, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

Still, despite massive losses few Russian oligarchs have disappeared from the economic landscape — thanks to creative crisis-management strategies that are as varied as their business interests. Case in point: Aluminum and nickel king Oleg Deripaska had accrued a personal fortune of almost $50 billion by early 2008, making him the richest Russian. But as metal prices plummeted and his stock-market-backed bank loans soured he was soon the most indebted Russian. Nonetheless, he has successfully appealed for state bank assistance on the grounds that his empire is too big to be allowed to fail.

Mikhail Fridman, who last year had a net worth of $20.8 billion, according to Forbes , has pleaded for mercy from his creditors while showing none to his debtors. Fridman secured a $2 billion Kremlin bailout to repay a loan from Deutsche Bank, which was threatening to foreclose on Vimpel Communications, his main telecommunications investment. Yet he risked forcing fellow oligarch Deripaska’s holding company, Basic Element, into bankruptcy until it repaid $360 million in loans to Fridman’s Alfa Bank.

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