Signs Point to a Power Struggle

Some cryptic billboards have appeared on Moscow’s streets, ones that advertise no product and contain a message so subtle--but sinister--that few of the people who pass by them each day pick up their meaning.

In fact, the signs aren’t meant for everyone. They’re actually giant postcards to the country’s most powerful people: The Family, as the Yeltsin clan is known. The riddle is, who is sending them?

This much, at least, is known: The billboards are a public sign of a power struggle between Russia’s top oligarchs. The battle, which has been going on behind the scenes for some time, is now erupting into the open as Russia’s titans in the media and political spheres jostle over next summer’s presidential elections.

Under the heading Clean Planet, the billboards show the eponymous hero of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince” digging into a little planet. A quotation from the famous children’s book warns of the dangers of the terrible baobab tree, which must be dug up before it takes root or it will be impossible to get rid of.

The coded message is in the word “baoBAB,” with three capital letters. Asked what it meant, passerby Yuri Abrosimov, 47, department head at a design bureau, squinted in concentration and concluded, “It could be about the environment.”

In fact, a more menacing message lurks behind the innocent prince. The letters BAB are the initials of one of the nation’s most powerful tycoons, Boris Abramovich Berezovsky, who is seen as part of The Family, a term used to describe not only President Boris N. Yeltsin and his family but also his entourage.

When the three letters were pointed out to her, Yelena Mayeva, 48, an engineer at a plastics factory, was shocked by the billboard.

“It’s really terrible if it is connected in some way with Berezovsky, because it’s an appeal to uproot and destroy him,” she said.

Even if the Little Prince billboards are the work of Berezovsky’s enemies, the tycoon shrugs them off.

“Since I am involved in political activity, I only profit if the BAB acronym creates an association with my name,” he said. “It is good for me.”

The Little Prince signs follow another cryptic billboard message around Moscow--what appeared to be personal birthday congratulations, with a photograph of a man and the words: “Roma thinks of The Family, The Family thinks of Roma. Congratulations. Roma has chosen a cool spot.”

Although most Russians would not recognize the picture, it was of Roman Abramovich, another powerful tycoon close to The Family and a director of the oil company Sibneft. The billboards weren’t up for long. After an angry complaint from Sibneft, the advertising company hastily took them down.

But it’s more difficult to lodge a complaint about the Little Prince billboards, because their message is more subtle. As passerby Abrosimov put it: “There are two groups in the population: the first, who are trying to make ends meet, and the second, who are on top fighting for power. The first group will never recognize the hidden meaning in this ad, while those who are fighting on top will catch the meaning straightaway.”

The billboards are only one sign of the power struggle, which is also visible in the news and interviews run by two of Russia’s powerful national TV networks--both controlled by big tycoons. The rapid-fire delivery of the Moscow news presenters makes it difficult for the average viewer to sort the propaganda from the real news, but the message is clear to political insiders.

So obvious has the media struggle become that politicians and pundits refer quite casually to the “TV war,” as if it were a normal thing in a country approaching parliamentary and presidential elections.

The war between the country’s two big TV networks is a sign that Russia’s tycoons, who joined to back Yeltsin in 1996, have split this time around. The throne is up for grabs.

“The fact the oligarchs have split now and are fighting each other means that the pattern of elections will be different from 1996, when everyone was scared of a Communist comeback,” said Kremlin watcher Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the Independent Institute for Strategic Studies. “There are no true Communists left, only swindlers, and all these swindlers are fighting each other like venomous snakes in a jar.”

The majority state-owned ORT channel, with its pro-Kremlin line, is widely believed to be controlled by Berezovsky. The station recently ran an expansive interview with Berezovsky, during which he bitterly attacked Moscow’s mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov, who has presidential ambitions.

Luzhkov is being backed by rival network NTV, owned by another powerful tycoon, Vladimir A. Gusinsky, who is Berezovsky’s bitter enemy. The night after ORT’s Berezovsky interview, NTV struck back, running a long interview with Luzhkov, who attacked Berezovsky.

ORT also ran a story reporting that NTV had massive debts. NTV snapped back with a story asserting that ORT had manipulated the figures, and named Berezovsky and Kremlin chief of staff Alexander S. Voloshin as architects of the attack.

Suddenly, NTV found itself under investigation by the tax police.

And there are other signs that the Kremlin wants to bring the opposing media baron to heel. After a ministry was set up in June to oversee the media, the new minister, Mikhail Y. Lesin, said that “protecting the state from a free mass media is a very pressing issue.”

Voloshin made similar threatening noises recently, warning that the pressure put on the Kremlin by NTV and Gusinsky’s other media was “impermissible.”

Some warn that the power struggle will send tremors through Russia’s fragile democracy or even culminate in the cancellation of elections. Political analyst Piontkovsky said Russia’s powerful tycoons now pose more of a threat to the country than the Communists.

“It is clear that neither of the sides will be able to maintain the present level of hysteria for yet another year [until presidential elections]. If the tension persists in the war between the clans, they are most likely to finish each other off before the elections,” he said.

But some believe that the TV war is a good thing, among them Nikolai Altynbayev, 38, who was interviewed at one of the Little Prince billboards.

“Let there be war,” he said. “In the course of this war, ordinary people will find out more new facts about each of the opposing sides as they sling mud at each other.”

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Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.