MOSCOW For two decades, Russia has been trying to build a 3,000-megawatt power plant deep in the heart of Siberia, pouring more than $1 billion into the project.

Now just half-finished, the plant needs about another $1 billion to be completed.

So along came Russia's aluminum king, Oleg Deripaska, who made a deal to provide a $10 million loan to keep the project alive. If the money is not repaid - the unfinished Boguchansk plant generates no revenue to pay debts - Deripaska will receive as much as 25 percent ownership of what may be at least a $2 billion power plant.

Deripaska, who is 34, called it a reasonable arrangement to save an important project while protecting his investment. He said he had made the loan agreement because the aluminum industry needed power and without him the plant would never be completed. His small cash infusion was meant just to get through the winter.

"I can find thousands of opportunities that would give a much higher return," Deripaska said.

To critics, the deal echoes the worst of the schemes of the 1990s, known as "loans for shares," in which emerging Russian oligarchs seized control of lucrative state assets for a small fraction of their value.

More than two years after Vladimir Putin took office as president, the Russian oligarchy he vowed to dismantle is alive and well.

During his presidential campaign, Putin declared that "the oligarchs will cease to exist as a class," yet with few prominent exceptions, the tycoons have prospered and even consolidated their holdings.

Under Putin, eight oligarchic clans control 85 percent of the value of Russia's top 64 private companies, according to one study. The combined sales of the top 12 private companies alone equal the revenue of the government.

Just as when Boris Yeltsin was president, oligarchs get richer while sometimes swindling minority shareholders and manipulating a pliant court system in battles for domination of the country's most precious economic resources.

"Under Yeltsin there were oligarchs, and under Putin there are still oligarchs, and in principle nothing has changed," said Alexei Zudin, an analyst at the Center for Political Technologies in Moscow.

If anything, the oligarchy has grown, adding a generation of rising titans with overflowing bank accounts and swaggers to match.

Deripaska has amassed a fortune estimated at $1.5 billion, making him one of the seven richest people in Russia. A crafty, hard-knuckled player sometimes accused of ruthless tactics, he controls the world's second-largest aluminum company and the country's second-largest automaker. Deripaska has lately tried to muscle his way into the timber industry as his allies sought to overturn a governor's election in Siberia.

In an interview at his polished Moscow offices, Deripaska, wearing a black shirt, black sports coat and blue jeans, defended himself and the evolution of oligarchic capitalism.

While business interests still fight it out, he said, these days they employ more legitimate tactics.

"It's a legal fight," he said, "and it's not bad that in some areas and some industries there is consolidation. It brings stability."

Stability has been the watchword of Putin's tenure. Rather than eliminate oligarchs as a class, he has institutionalized them and, to an extent, tamed them into more seemly behavior. Instead of giving favorites the run of the Kremlin as Yeltsin did, Putin meets with oligarchs as a group on a regular schedule with fixed agendas. The epic battles of the 1990s have morphed into more polite, less violent but still fierce contests.

"It's as intense as before," said Peter Aven, president of Alfa Bank and a minister in Yeltsin's government. "There's no big change. It's less criminal than before."

Under Putin, the oligarchs are free to assemble great wealth as long as they stay out of the political arena.

"He wants business to make business and not to do politics," Aven said. "Politics is not as much on the agenda as before."

The oligarchs emerged from the ashes of communism a decade ago as the nascent Russian government began privatizing state-owned industries.

In the rush to tear apart the old state and build a market economy, Yeltsin's reformers sold off assets for rock-bottom prices. Some of the more entrepreneurial Russians - and some of the more crooked - snatched up oil wells, mines and factories and siphoned off vast amounts of cash to foreign banks.

For a time, it appeared that these magnates were running not just banks and factories but also the Kremlin while Yeltsin was in power, especially after they helped re-elect him in 1996.

Putin, although he was Yeltsin's hand-picked successor, tapped into popular resentment and initially appeared eager to take on the oligarchs, ordering investigations into the two most outspoken, Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, and driving them out of the country.

But Putin stopped there, making clear that only those who challenged him would face trouble. What emerged was a mutual nonaggression pact.

"The agreement is, we're not getting involved in politics - we're in economics," said Igor Yurgens, vice president of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, the association of oligarchs.

"And the other side is, he's not really involved in the competitive business fights."

Aides to Putin said the perception that oligarchs did not own the Russian president had loosened their grip on the rest of government as well.

In the past, a Kremlin official said, "Bureaucrats were afraid to refuse because they thought, 'If I refuse, the oligarch will go to Yeltsin, and Yeltsin will fire me.'

"And now that's not the case," the official said. "The oligarchs economically can still buy bureaucrats, but bureaucrats aren't afraid of them. That's a very important difference.'

The oligarchs, however, still have a place at Putin's table through their association.

Every three months, two dozen of them troop into Catherine Hall at the Kremlin for tea with Putin. They include Deripaska as well as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, chief executive of the oil giant Yukos OAO, and Mikhail Fridman, chairman of Alfa Group, whose holdings include oil, retail and a mobile phone company. Putin brings his chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, and prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov.

The group dynamic has formalized the relationship in a way that encourages discussion of broader issues rather than personal lobbying, said Yurgens, the vice president of the oligarchs' association. Even by his account, though, the oligarchs maintain great sway over issues affecting them. They won corporate tax cuts and shaped Putin policies on banking, bankruptcy and deregulation.

"I would say 70 percent of the time, when the position is clearly put together, he says, 'Yes,'" Yurgens said. "In 30 percent, he says: 'No, no, no, it's too early. It's in the interest of big business, not in the interests of the country.'"

The bottom line for many oligarchs has been a more secure environment. Assured that Putin will leave them alone, they have expanded their fiefdoms.

Many have brought home money that had been spirited abroad and begun investing in their companies; capital flight is down a reported 80 percent. Instead of quick profit, many now look to the future and aspire to respectability, adopting Western-style accounting and corporate rules.

"They've reined in themselves," said Peter Boone, research director at the brokerage Brunswick UBS Warburg. "We certainly see it in the companies we deal with."