Can This Man Piece Russia Back Together?

Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov is a hunted man these days. As a crowd of journalists tailed him on one of his traditional weekend walkabouts through Moscow building sites awash in wet snow and mud, he tried his best to look the jaunty, workaholic city boss of old. But when the journalists cornered him, the mayor admitted that his mind was elsewhere. He was waiting for the next body blow from the Kremlin.

He has good reason to be worried. For the past few weeks, day after day, Russian state television has been accusing Luzhkov of a lurid array of crimes--from involvement in the murder of an American businessman to a connection with a Japanese cult, and, of course, massive venality. His chief of police has been fired, and reports are circulating that some of his top deputies will soon be indicted for corruption.

It's nothing personal. Luzhkov--who has strenuously denied each of the accusations--is being targeted because he is a leader, along with former Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov, of Fatherland-All Russia, the main opposition group running in Russia's Dec. 19 parliamentary elections. And the fight between the Kremlin and Fatherland is less for the Duma, or lower house of Parliament, than for position in the June 2000 presidential elections. The success of the Luzhkov-Primakov alliance in next weekend's vote will decide whether current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin can expect to coast into the presidency next June or will have to face a serious challenger. Luzhkov isn't running for the Duma next weekend, but in the peculiar world of Russian politics, he is vying, through Fatherland, for a shot at controlling Russia's future.

Luzhkov has been on the mind of many Russians since he won re-election as mayor in 1996 with almost 90% of the vote, an astonishing endorsement. Only five years younger than Yeltsin, he has ostentatiously underlined his vigor--and the President's frailty--with regular, well-publicized games of soccer and tennis. Small, bullet-headed and energetic, Luzhkov, 63, seemed like the kind of reformer who might be able to do for Russian politics what he has done for Moscow--get rid of the trash and make things work.

Moscow-born, the son of a carpenter, and a mechanical engineer by training, Luzhkov rose through the unfashionable side of the Soviet hierarchy. He was an executive in the Soviet chemical industry, not a party bureaucrat. Nevertheless, he is anything but a dry party hack. He has a fascination with Catherine the Great, for instance, and he spends his spare time raising bees at his dacha outside Moscow.

His ability to make things work drew the attention in the mid-1980s of the Communist Party boss in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin. Luzhkov rose steadily under Yeltsin's benevolent shadow, and in 1992 was appointed mayor of Moscow. When the communist system collapsed, the city unceremoniously took over as much of the party's resources as it could. A corporation that is closely controlled by the mayor, Sistema ("the system"), now controls much of the capital's prime real estate, factories and construction firms, plus a media empire that includes a couple of TV stations. Luzhkov has described his blueprint for Russia's future as a mix of capitalism and state control. His models: England's Prime Minister Tony Blair and the New Labour Party.