In fact, present-day Russia is beginning to seem so dysfunctional that one has to wonder whether the next victim could not well be President Putin himself.

When Putin became Russia's president, he proclaimed that the drift and lawlessness of the early post-communist era were over. Russia would now have a new, solid political apparatus – and state power will be strengthened.

Under former president Boris Yeltsin, bankers, entrepreneurs, politicians and bureaucrats had been killed by professional hit men with alarming regularity.

Almost none of the murders were ever solved. So, when Putin promised to put an end to "Wild East" capitalism, most Russians breathed a sigh of relief. But now, the killings are back, more frequent than before and with an ominous new twist.

The only thing that is clear at this juncture is that the stability, clarity and rational state control that Putin had promised to bring to Russia has not materialized.

The authorities never seem able to solve any of those crimes satisfactorily, giving rise to a non-stop rumour mill and growing fear.

Russian websites and Moscow kitchens are abuzz with speculation of who is responsible and why.

Was it Putin, wanting to eliminate his most outspoken opponents? Was it somebody in his entourage trying to please him? Politkovskaya, after all, was killed on Oct. 7, Putin's 54th birthday.

Was it exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, trying to cast the blame on Putin? Was it Russian security forces trying to cast the blame on Berezovsky?

Was it the CIA? Was it somebody else entirely for reasons unknown?

A growing chorus in the West believe that Putin could be, in some way or other, behind the murders of his more prominent critics.

They acknowledge, of course, that the murders would risk destroying his presidency – and cast a deep shadow on Russia.

Asked to explain his motives, they point to the old fable in which a frog agrees to carry a scorpion across a river. As it carries the scorpion on its back, the frog feels a sharp sting.

"You fool," the frog cries. "You've stung me. Now I'm going to die – and you will drown. Why did you do it?"

"It's my nature," shrugs the scorpion.

According to this view, this is Putin's nature, too. After all, he was trained in the cloak-and-dagger arts of the Soviet KGB, which was notorious for eliminating the opponents of Soviet leaders – for example, the assassination of Joseph Stalin's rival Leon Trotsky in 1940.

The people who suspect Putin also point to the strange death of Anatoly Sobchak, the former mayor of St. Petersburg and Putin's early patron, during the presidential election campaign in 2000. In that case, too, poisoning was rumoured.

It would be bad enough if Putin, his men or rogue security operatives are indeed behind this new murder spree.

But even worse is that nobody really knows the truth and probably never will.

Russia has always been complex and Byzantine and now, under the veneer of political stability, really strange things are happening.

In fact, there are some who would not be surprised if one day soon Putin himself wakes up with a dagger in his back – or collapses after eating a cheerful meal in the company of close associates.

That's an indication of just how bad things have become in Russia.

In retrospect, the Soviet era almost seems to have been driven by rational acts.

For all its faults, the Soviet elites were focused on matters such as education and science, in an effort to sustain the Soviet Union even against the long odds given the backward economic system.

In contrast, today's elites seem primarily focused on getting their hands on whatever assets they can to enrich themselves privately and grotesquely, even if it means eating the country's seed corn and destroying its future as a functioning society.

While the country "produces" millionaires and billionaires galore, it is evident that next to nothing is being invested for the future – even in the energy sector, the field most critical for Russia's long-term survival.

Russia's elites don't seem terribly worried by that.

In their minds, they seem to believe they will all be shipped out to villas at the Cote d'Azur and live the charmed lives of robber barons, country of their birth be damned.

Truth be told, this kind of self-destruction and exploitation of the rest of society is probably a late effect of the destructiveness and recklessness harboured in the Soviet system.

But while Putin's Russia has been compared to a newly emerging Russian Empire with him as czar, medieval Rome is probably a better comparison.

There too, various people, including quite a few Pontiffs, regularly ended up dead for no apparent reason.

Even centuries later, historians have not been able to figure out why.