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What happens to annual revenues estimated in the hundreds of millions--perhaps billions--of dollars? Not all of it goes to cover the maintenance costs of mosques, cemeteries, religious schools and libraries. Over the past decade the foundation has bought new businesses and properties, established investment banks (together with investors from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates), funded real estate projects and financed big foreign trade deals.

The driving force behind the commercialization of the Razavi Foundation is Ayatollah Tabasi's son, Naser, who was put in charge of the Sarakhs Free Trade Zone, on the border with the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan. In the 1990s the foundation poured hundreds of millions of dollars into this project, funding a rail link between Iran and Turkmenistan, new highways, an international airport, a hotel and office buildings. It even paid $2.3 million to a Swiss firm to erect a huge tent for the ceremonies inaugurating the Iran-Turkmenistan rail link.

Then it all went wrong. In July 2001 Naser Tabasi was dismissed as director of the Free Trade Zone. Two months later he was arrested and charged with fraud in connection with a Dubai-based company called Al-Makasib. The details of the case remain murky, but four months ago the General Court of Tehran concluded that Naser Tabasi had not known that he was breaking the law and acquitted him.

There are other examples, like Turkmenistan’s May signing of a gas exploration deal with a German company, and Armenia’s awarding of a major national honor to Moscow’s nemesis, President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia. But the biggest came last week when Kyrgyzstan — set to receive $2.15 billion in Russian aid — reversed a decision that had been seen as a coup for Moscow, last winter’s order terminating the American military’s use of the Manas Air Base there.

There are few projects that matter more to Russia than restoring its influence in the former Soviet republics, whose loss to many in Moscow is still as painful as a phantom limb. Competition over Georgia and Ukraine has brought relations between Moscow and Washington to a post-cold-war low, and the matter is bound to be central to the talks that begin on Monday between Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, and President Obama.

Russia’s ability to attract its neighbors to its side and keep them there is unimpressive. The Kremlin’s methods have been reactive and often bullying, combining incentives like cheap energy or cash disbursement with threats of trade sanctions and gas cutoffs.The war in Georgia seems to have hurt Moscow in that regard. Rather than being cowed into obedience, as most Western observers feared, the former republics seem to have grown even more protective of their sovereignty. Moreover, the leaders themselves have thrived by playing Russia and the West and, in some cases, China off against one another, although that has not brought stability or prosperity to their countries. In Moscow’s so-called zone of privileged interests, in other words, Russia is just another competitor.

Kyrgyzstan’s reversal on Manas is a case study in canny horse trading. Russian officials, including Mr. Medvedev, have said they blessed the decision, and that may be true, but President Kurmanbek S. Bakiyev is the one who walked away with what he wanted. Moscow wanted the base, a key transit hub for the United States’ war in Afghanistan, shut down; Kyrgyzstan wanted more money. In February, Moscow seemed to have achieved a master stroke — at a news conference announcing the pledge of $2.15 billion in Russian aid, Mr. Bakiyev said the United States would have to leave Manas in six months.

The first Russian payments — a $150 million emergency grant and a $300 million low-interest loan — arrived in April, allowing Mr. Bakiyev to pay wages and pensions as he began his re-election campaign. Then Kyrgyzstan shocked the region by announcing a new agreement with the United States. Washington will pay more than triple the rent for the base — now called a “transit center” — increasing its annual payment to $60 million from $17.4 million, while kicking in upwards of $50 million in grants to the government. No one knows if the Kremlin will make good on the rest of its pledge.

Moldova, which has just received a Russian pledge of $500 million four weeks before voters go to the polls to elect a new Parliament.

Belarus’s president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, who is avidly pursuing Western partners, has been barraged with carrots and sticks from Moscow — first promised $2 billion in Russian aid, then bitterly chastised for his economic policy, then punished with a crippling ban on the import of milk products, then rewarded by a reversal of the import ban. Russia regards Mr. Lukashenko’s truculence as a bluff.