Moscow’s Mayor Quits for Real, Assails Russia’s Policies

Gavriil Popov, the rotund burgomaster of Moscow, made clear Wednesday that this time he really meant it when he quit.

After two years at the helm of this troubled metropolis and repeated threats to leave, Popov, 56, told a final news conference that he is stepping down because he cannot reconcile himself to Russian government policy and wants to devote himself full-time to national reforms.

Russian commentators saw the resignation as the end of the era when idealistic theorists--Popov is an economics professor--could oversee Russia’s transition from communism to capitalism. Popov is being replaced for now by his vice mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, who is known as a hard-nosed manager.

Popov’s departure also highlighted just how poorly many of the new Russian power structures are working.

The outgoing mayor described how, politically handcuffed by his unwieldy city council, he had to appeal four times directly to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin for more power to launch basic reforms in Moscow. And for all his trying, he said, he still could not manage to get the asphalt to pave city streets properly or find new garbage dump sites.

What really got to him, however, was the Russian government’s planned program of privatizing state property, under which most state-owned stores and factories would be sold either at token prices to their own workers or auctioned off to the highest bidder, he said.

The privatization system would deprive masses of common people, particularly pensioners, of the share in the nation’s riches that they earned under the Communist system, Popov said.

As his main achievement, Popov touted his success at simply “holding this city in a state of stability.”

Before each of the last two winters, he said, skeptics had warned that Muscovites would freeze and starve, and each winter, he and Luzhkov have descended, clad only in bathing trunks, through the ice into the frigid Moscow River water and emerged unscathed, just as the city has.

The widely photographed event, capturing Popov and the equally roly-poly Luzhkov in their briefs and then paddling in the numbing water, has proved to be a memorable scene of Russian politics.

Popov, who plans to concentrate on his work in the liberal Movement for Democratic Reforms, said he also got great pleasure just from participating in dismantling the Communist Party’s regime, including the time during last August’s coup when he ordered subordinates to seize the Communist Party headquarters and quickly received a call reporting success.

He resigns under something of a cloud, however. There are mounting accusations that his administration was as riddled with corruption as the old party-run bureaucracy.

Yuri Shchekochikhin, a Moscow journalist known for his exposes of organized crime, charged in a full-page story Wednesday in the prestigious Literaturnaya Gazeta that Luzhkov had vacationed abroad on mysterious income.

Popov objected to such accusations, arguing that if newspapers want to, they can--and do--accuse him of becoming the richest man in Russia on illegal earnings, “but you have to have proof.”