Today, so much corruption has eaten in to big business in Russia that no one speaks of it as a violent spasm, an aberration which will perish through its own internal strife, or through being shopped by a public no longer prepared to be bullied by the gangster's crossfire.

Seven years after the downfall of the Soviet Union neither of those outcomes has occurred, and if decent people mention murderous profiteering at all, it is with that familiar gloom of the Russian soul, that fatalism which defines post-communist crime as the slow, nightmarish seeping away of honour, destroying any attempt at civilised life.

On Sunday night one of the country's most influential executives became the latest victim of a mafia-inspired execution. No clamouring outrage or shock surrounded the news. Instead the realisation brought only further dull despair.

And, as is almost always the case, the assassins escaped, suggesting to many that here again was one more addition to the hundreds of killings which remain unpunished.

And while the authorities pursue their set-piece investigations, the President will, as ever, side with the people, denouncing his appointees as incompetents and shuffling yet another batch of officials into positions of ''vigilance''. But nothing will happen to weaken the immunity of hitmen. Why would it when to do so would simply mean that the authorities were serving death notices on themselves?

One factor, though, makes this latest murder exceptional: the victim was a woman, Larisa Nechayeva, director general of Moscow Spartak, the most popular soccer team in Russia. Was she a mistaken target?

The likelihood is no, for the attack took place at her country home outside the capital, and she was slain with skill and precision, bullets entering her chest and head.

The police already claim they can identify the attackers, but Alexander Lvov, Spartak's spokesman, denies such knowledge is in their hands, denies too that Nechayeva was the recipient of threats, or that she had been involved in business conflicts. Thus everyone appears to be working from prepared texts: the police give just enough away to imply their response is fast and efficient; the enterprise involved - mindful that, for whatever reason, it is a gangland target - gives nothing away at all.

Nechayeva was the most prominent woman in Russian soccer, reporting directly to the club president, Oleg Romantsev, and since sports organisations have become increasingly the blackmailed territory of the underworld, it is perfectly possible that she was an uncooperative player in the vicious game where the Mob takes a fat cut of the takings. Or else, as an astute financier, Nechayeva simply discovered too much. Last April, Valentin Sych, president of the country's Ice Hockey Federation, was also murdered in a contract killing. No-one has been apprehended.

However, in the Vagan-kovskye, Moscow's most illustrious cemetery, the origin of all such shoot-outs may lie interred with the bones of Otari Kvantrishuili. Two years ago Otari, a noted athlete and wrestler in his youth, was shot by a sniper operating from a kindergarten window. He was born in Georgia, then raised by a Moscow family who tutored him brilliantly in gambling.

Otari, however, became far more impressive than a card sharp. He was an important businessman, a philanthropist beloved by war veterans and orphans. And, as everyone also knew but only mentioned in whispers, Otari was a gangster, one of the most powerful in the country. Equally significant, in his earlier years he had been the coach for Dynamo, the Moscow sports club of the militia, his role there drawing him into contact with eminent cultural figures and aides close to Boris Yeltsin.

During the past two years there have been well over 200 attacks on Russian businessmen, many of them mafia bosses themselves, although the majority are legitimate entrepreneurs. But at Otari's funeral the stately line of mourners confirmed everything about the perilous intrigue of Moscow life today.

Actors, politicians, sportsmen, crooners, tycoons, impresarios . . . with black armbands and roses they gathered, all in some way connected to fortunes piled up first from vice and shady deals. Small wonder, then, that ordinary folk keep their weeping not for notable corpses but for themselves. Burglarised by the Soviet system, their lives now robbed by impatient racketeers and an economy which, despite recent growth, still disregards them, more and more citizens are pushed into crime by the maelstrom of problems. Trapped, as Chekhov predicted, between two sets of values: the old ones already dead, the new ones not yet born.