If nothing else, invoking the KGB as Moscow’s modern-day version of “The Untouchables” shows just how out of control Russia became during Boris Yeltsin’s decade in power. To many businessmen, both Russian and Western, the idea of setting the FSB loose to combat Russia’s mobsters, money launderers and other economic criminals doesn’t sound half bad. International investors have begun to poke around in Russia again. Its stock market over the past year has been one of the strongest in the world. The burgeoning hope is that Putin will push stalled economic reforms forward—a sweeping new tax law, for example—and restore some semblance of order. The Moscow head of one of the world’s largest companies, speaking hopefully about the possibilities of the Putin era, recently repeated the old Deng Xiaoping dictum: “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white,” he said, “as long as it catches mice.” Translated into the Russian context, that means if Putin needs to re-energize the FSB to provide the order needed to improve the economy, so be it.

If only it were that easy. Set aside the potential threat to civil liberties that an unrestrained domestic security service conjures up. If it’s mice you want to catch, there’s one big problem: many KGB people were “privatized” during the Yeltsin era. Russian companies, from those run by Moscow’s infamous oligarchs to huge regional firms, have former security-service personnel working for them. They serve as bodyguards, intelligence agents and, in some cases, top executives.

The reason is simple: capitalist incentives. One 41-year-old surveillance expert who used to work for a large Moscow bank says that when he left the KGB in the mid-’90s, his salary increased nearly tenfold. He says he knows about a dozen colleagues who had the same experience. Given that, who’s left at the FSB? “Two classes of people,” he says. “One, the most dedicated public servants. And two, those intelligence agents who maybe aren’t so intelligent.”

Ex-KGB man Putin knows this. He’s also aware that his former colleagues in the private sector often have access to equipment—software, bugs—that outclasses anything his government has. Add to that his narrow margin of victory—52 percent—and he can be expected to move cautiously at best on the corruption front. In the eyes of many in Moscow, the key test will be how Putin handles Yeltsin crony Boris Berezovsky. The uber-oligarch is the subject of a Swiss investigation into allegations that companies tied to him siphoned millions from Aeroflot, the Russian national airline, and laundered the money through Swiss banks. Berezovsky has denied the allegations; the Swiss want more Russian help on the matter. Berezovsky is closely linked to the Yeltsin clan and no doubt had a role in Putin’s rise to the top. That may mean he’s invulnerable.

Some of Berezovsky’s enemies are more optimistic than that. Late last week a prominent Moscow muckraker charged in the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets that the current Interior minister, Vladimir Rushailo, misused funds earlier in his career. (Rushailo has denied any improprieties.) To Moscow’s political class, the broader significance of the story was that Rushailo is very close to Berezovsky. Was it a signal of trouble to come for both of them? It’s no secret that most of the men who stayed behind in Russia’s outgunned and underfunded security services in the 1990s would now love to see Putin take on some of Russia’s bandit capitalists. They are now about to find out if he has the guts to do so.