With his smooth cheeks and angelic looks, Andrei Melnichenko seems awfully young to be one of the key players in the next stage of Russia's capitalist revolution. Yet Melnichenko has already helped turn Moscow's MDM Group into a $3 billion-a-year chemicals, pipeline, and coal business. And in a country in which the free-market economy is barely more than 10 years old, the players may look like cherubs, but they can bite like wolves. "He's 30--and he wants to own the world," says Len Blavatnik, an influential Russian-born U.S. citizen who invests in oil and aluminum and who, at 45, is an elder in Russia's big business set.

Bona fide senior tycoons sure take Melnichenko's moves seriously. His big play? It's not oil or metals, the traditional industries where a tycoon earns his stripes in this tumultuous economy. No, he's headed back to the land, the land that once made Mother Russia great. Russia's farming sector is poised to boom with the recent passage of legislation that authorizes the private ownership of agricultural acreage. That has set off a scramble to buy the choicest plots from Soviet-era cooperatives. If a few companies can apply modern farming techniques to these vast tracts, the increase in grain yields could be enormous.