Moscow Mayor Pokes Kremlin. (Cue Hornets.)

Moscow Mayor Pokes Kremlin. (Cue Hornets.)
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
copyright by Reuters
Published: September 23, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/world/europe/24moscow.html?th&emc=th


MOSCOW — Of all the high priests of Russian officialdom, few have become more deeply entrenched in power than Moscow’s mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov.

He has ruled this city often like a fief for nearly two decades, transforming it from a Soviet wreck into a shimmering metropolis. Barrel-chested and bald, with a proletarian’s peaked cap, he has seemingly been above reproach for years, despite numerous allegations of corruption even as his wife, a real estate developer, has become Russia’s richest woman.

But a slight jab at President, Dmitri A. Medvedev could now bring the mayor’s once inviolable authority to ruin. In a recent article, Mr. Luzhkov appeared to criticize the president for indecisiveness, while seeming to call for his predecessor, Vladimir V. Putin, now prime minister, to return to the presidency.

The article touched off the biggest political quarrel Russia has seen in nearly a decade, raising new speculation about the relationship between Russia’s two leaders. It has also prompted an all-out attack by the Kremlin-controlled news media against the mayor, which many analysts here say could presage the end of his 18-year reign.

“He intended to try to push a wedge between Medvedev and Putin,” said Gleb O. Pavlovsky, a political consultant who advises the Kremlin. “This is already an intolerable situation for the federal center, so I think Luzhkov will have to leave.”

It is an unexpected battle in a country that has long appeared drained of public political life, pitting Russia’s young president — an avid blogger with a fondness for gadgets — against a man who has been a part of the political elite of Moscow since it was still the capital of the Soviet Union.

The fight has at turns resembled an old-time Politburo power struggle and an election for student government. This week, Russian political pundits scrambled over the news that Mr. Medvedev, 45, had snubbed Mr. Luzhkov, offering no public congratulations to the mayor on the occasion of his 74th birthday.

It could have been the latest sign that the mayor was on his way out. But who knows? Mr. Putin praised him in a birthday telegram as a “competent and experienced professional.”

This is Russian politics, a game of interpreting winks and gestures, of listening for murmurs in the dark corridors of power. It is an art that today differs little from the days when Kremlinologists guessed the fortune or failure of a Soviet leader by his place at the May Day parade.

What is more or less certain is that Mr. Medvedev wants Mr. Luzhkov gone. When asked about the mayor in a closed meeting with Russian newspaper editors this summer, Mr. Medvedev shocked attendees by referring to the mayor with a vulgarism, a person at the meeting said.

Since becoming president in 2008, Mr. Medvedev has eliminated most of the old regional bosses, usually by offering them other jobs or retirement deals, but Mr. Luzhkov is different.

“Here, we do not fire anyone, we simply buy them off,” said Georgi A. Satarov, the president of the Indem Foundation, a policy research group focusing on corruption. “But it is hard to buy off Luzhkov because he is very expensive.”

Whatever has gone on behind closed doors over the past few weeks, if there was an attempt to make Mr. Luzhkov walk away quietly, experts say, it seems to have failed.

In Mr. Luzhkov’s article, published in the official newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta, the mayor criticized Mr. Medvedev’s rare decision to bow to public pressure to halt construction of a highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, suggesting that such hesitation to press ahead with development projects undermined trust in the government. He called for the return of “true meaning and authority to the Russian government.”

The response was swift and brutal. Days after the article was published, the government-owned NTV television station broadcast “The Cap Affair,” named for the mayor’s trademark peaked hat.

The film, crudely produced and set to ominous-sounding music, was extraordinary by the typically bland standards of official television here, raising uncomfortable questions about Moscow’s crumbling transportation infrastructure and the astounding wealth of Mr. Luzhkov’s billionaire wife, Yelena Baturina.

It also criticized Mr. Luzhkov for taking a vacation in Austria this summer as Muscovites choked on noxious fumes from peat bog fires during a record heat wave, and said the mayor, an avid beekeeper, returned to Moscow only to save his hives.

The documentary was followed by programs on other government channels, which accused Mr. Luzhkov of, among other things, complicity in the evictions of Muscovites from their homes to make way for his wife’s development projects.

The accusations are nothing new. For years, opposition groups have made the same claims — and have faced lawsuits and even brief prison sentences for doing so.

Mr. Luzhkov, who left for Austria once again this week, has vowed to file lawsuits against the government channels responsible for the recent documentaries and has refused to respond to allegations made in them.

“To make justifications is the wrong way to defend yourself in Russia,” he told REN-TV television, a quasi-independent channel, last week. “If a person starts to justify himself it appears that he is nevertheless guilty.”

Guilty or not, few here believe that corruption or other misdeeds prompted the recent attacks. None of the documentaries mention that Mr. Luzhkov is a leading member of Mr. Putin’s party or that the mayor serves at the pleasure of the president, who has the power to appoint and remove regional leaders at will.

“In a democratic country there would just be elections,” said Viktor A. Shenderovich, a satirical political writer, who has criticized the mayor for years. “But all this is happening not in a democratic country, but in Byzantium. Luzhkov is being removed not because he stole or was corrupt, but because he has gotten caught between two clans.”

Ms. Baturina, the mayor’s wife, explained the campaign against her husband as part of a conflict about whether Mr. Medvedev or Mr. Putin would run for president in elections scheduled for 2012.

“As the elections approach, there are people in the presidential administration who are afraid that the mayor will support not President Medvedev, but Prime Minister Putin,” she said in an interview with the Russian news magazine, The New Times, published this week.

There is little evidence to suggest any conflict between Russia’s two leaders, and both have consistently brushed aside questions about their plans for 2012.

Even the conflict over the mayor has elicited nary a public word from the nation’s top two leaders. Mr. Medvedev has only hinted at his displeasure with Mr. Luzhkov, leaving anonymous Kremlin sources to whisper confirmation of the mayor’s impending demise in the ears of reporters.