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William F. Browder manages more foreign money in Moscow than anyone else, but he sees no conflict in lobbying both for and against a Russia that has made him wealthy and persona non grata.

While the recent nose dive in emerging markets was taking 25% off Russian shares, Mr. Browder was in New York reassuring clients of his Hermitage Capital Management that the country had fallen victim to panic selling unrelated to its own oil-rich, high-growth fundamentals. Using a thick flip-chart of supporting data, he argued Russia had an easy 10% to 15% short-term upside simply from global calming.

That followed a stop in Washington where he was campaigning to get senators and administration officials to pressure Russian leaders to restore his right to enter their country, revoked without explanation late last year. The argument of this British citizen who gave up his U.S. passport in 1998: Uncle Sam should help protect the roughly $1 billion of the $4 billion he manages that is in American hands. The U.K. has already given its support.

I've tracked Mr. Browder over the years as a canary in a Russian coal mine whose survival and increased wealth despite the country's defects and risks were somehow reassuring. Mr. Browder has been personally responsible for bringing hundreds of millions of dollars of investment to Russia while fighting some winning battles against corporate malfeasance.

His saga has additional biographical panache as this leading capitalist in Russia is the grandson of former American Communist Party leader Earl Browder. His story remains important now for its insight into a country that is going bad even as it grows rich, though Mr. Browder has too much at stake to put it quite that way.

"I make my money off Russia's transition from horrible to bad," explains Mr. Browder, settling into a plush chair in New York's Four Seasons Hotel while checking his PDA for the latest market movements. "Russia sucks. If it sucks less over time, I gain. If it were really horrible now, I would have suffered far worse than losing my visa."

Yet the truth is that Russia is growing more corrupt and less democratic with each additional $1 per barrel of oil. The higher prices rise, the greater Mr. Browder's returns -- they've gone up 35% since his exile. Yet the greed of his enemies has grown as well, increasing the motivation of those whose corporate wrongdoing he has unearthed to send him a warning message through their friends in the visa office. Or at least that's the closest he can come to a theory for his exile.

Mr. Browder argues that President Vladimir Putin, who rode into power on an anticorruption mantra, has instead shifted the business from 22 oligarchs to the hands of 10,000 bureaucrats. "The economic cost of corruption has declined dramatically," he says. "But the number of people implementing corruption has expanded."

Mr. Browder figures Mr. Putin needs two types of individuals: retrograde security thugs to help him survive and reform economists to ensure the system continues to work. It has been the shifting of power to the thugs from the reformists that ought to raise concerns among his shareholders.

He views last week's surprising steel-merger proposal under which Alexei Mordashov, owner of Russian steel company Severstal, is to acquire roughly a third of Luxembourg's Arcelor as a smart businessman's hedge against his country's increasingly uncertain future. Mr. Mordashov, Mr. Browder says, has made "a major wealth-protection move two years before the uncertainties of the Russian presidential transition. No matter how good his steel company is, it is unwise to have $10 billion, or 100% of his net worth, in Russia."

Mr. Browder's detractors have little sympathy for his campaign to regain his visa, arguing that he has always been driven primarily by financial self-interest, something he doesn't deny. His fight to re-enter Russia lacks the same moral quality that prompted an earlier era of Western campaigns for the likes of Soviet dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky to leave the country. Moreover, his critics condemn him as the leading cheerleader in the West for Mr. Putin despite Russia's antidemocratic turn and the Kremlin-orchestrated 2003 arrest and jailing of former Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Mr. Browder's best guess of why Mr. Putin hasn't returned loyalty by intervening on his behalf is that he has a more powerful competing interest.

In the past weeks, Mr. Browder has learned some uncomfortable truths about today's Russia. He has come to agree that the country does have a powerful "Siliviki," a clan of former KGB officers who have considerable influence over the country's course. He also has concluded that more important for Russian leaders than whether you dissent or agree with them politically is whether you challenge their economic interests.

He won't go so far as to say he was wrong about Mr. Khodorkovsky, who he still insists committed crimes for which Russia was justified to convict him. Yet he concedes he now has "more sympathy" for Mr. Khodorkovsky because he was singled out for infractions others also committed by others.

I don't write the following lines with the same conviction that I wore my "Free Sharansky" T-shirt years ago. Yet it is in Russia's interests to throw open its doors to a man who has brought the country so much investment and improved corporate governance -- just as it should restore the visas of a half-dozen other leading financial market players in a similar predicament. Or like any country guided by due process, it should justify his travel ban so he can properly appeal.

Mr. Browder's campaign is self-serving, but the Bush administration shouldn't let that stand in the way of its own support. After all, nothing ensures the workings of the free market more than the protection of enlightened self-interest.

Should Bush administration officials intervene on Bill Browder's behalf? Is Mr. Browder right that Russian stocks remain a buy?