Looks like my Foolish colleague, W.D. Crotty, called it right. In reviewing the Russian tax police's $157 million tax claim against Russian telecom VimpelCom (NYSE:VIP) earlier this month, he mused that the 22% decline in Vimpel's shares might have created a buying opportunity in the stock. And indeed it did.

Three weeks later, Vimpel shares are now selling for 19% more than the $30.10 they touched in the immediate wake of the tax claim -- and 43% more than their low since the news, reached on Dec. 17 at a nadir of $25 per stub. The reason: Yesterday, Russia announced that instead of $157 million, Vimpel actually owed only $17.6 million. Translating from the original Russian, the tax officer responsible confessed: "Whoopsie. Our bad." (No. That's not a direct translation.) On hearing the news, the market bid up Vimpel's shares an extra 6% yesterday, putting them at $35.78.

Of course, this rebound was never a sure thing. And W.D. correctly warned that betting against the Russian tax police can be risky. Sound advice, and advice that Vimpel heeded. Rather than just hire lawyers to fight this dispute out in court, Vimpel went straight to the top, enlisting political support to help bring the tax police around to its point of view. Describing how the company succeeded in winning this argument, Vimpel's CEO was quoted in Thursday's press release saying: "We are grateful for the active role of several senior government officials, including officials who are very knowledgeable of the Russian tax code." Read between the lines, and that translates to: "We made them an offer they couldn't refuse."

As for what this mean to investors, it depends on where they're investing. To investors in YUKOS, this reads like a lesson straight out of Russian Politics 102: Fortune favors the well connected. (For those who missed it, Russian Politics 101's lesson was: The less-than-well-connected wind up sitting in Matrosskaya Tishina prison while the government tears their companies to pieces.)

Investors in Vimpel, on the other hand, should be reassured by the nine-fold reduction in their company's tax assessment. It's strong evidence that their company, at least, does have some friends in the Kremlin. And that minimizes the likelihood that the company will be hit with the wave of pile-on tax assessments that destroyed YUKOS.

Finally, for investors in Russia generally, the fact that the Kremlin seems to have called its dogs off of Vimpel may provide some assurance that the YUKOS debacle didn't foreshadow a wave of similar expropriations of private property. The international reaction to the Yuganskneftegaz fiasco might just have made a enough of an impression on the Kremlin that it will agree to play nice for a while.

For recent Foolish coverage of the YUKOS story, read:

Fool contributor Rich Smith owns no shares in any company mentioned in this article.