His sleeves rolled up, his plump arms folded, Yury Luzhkov, presiding over a recent city planning meeting, towered above a miniature styrofoam diorama of a Moscow neighborhood like Gulliver over Lilliput.


Scolding a cowed architect here, nodding his blessing to a supplicant there, the mayor of Moscow was in his element. But Luzhkov, a barrel-chested bureaucrat with a flair for the grandiloquent gesture, sometimes seems to chafe for an even bigger stage.


He calls for a revival of the Russian Orthodox Church, he slams United States policy in the Balkans, he doles out funds to earthquake victims eight time zones east in Sakhalin. This is a mayor with a national vision and a foreign policy. And a growing number of analysts believe he is aiming his cannonball of a head straight over the Kremlin ramparts.


They believe he has a realistic shot to succeed Boris Yeltsin in 1996.


"He can definitely become president," said Sergei Markov, a political analyst at the Carnegie Endowment's Center for Russian and European Programs in Moscow. "He is one of the most important and influential people in the country."


Avoiding the infighting that has bogged down many national politicians, Luzhkov this year has consolidated control over the city's valuable real estate and vast resources -- even pulling rank over top government ministers -- and cemented alliances with powerful business people.


He has honed a potent populist image as a hands-on leader able both to bring prosperity and to restore some of the order and national glory that disappeared with the Soviet Union.


And he has staked out an arena of influence and visibility that stretches far beyond the borders of Moscow, traveling in Russia and abroad. Championing grandiose projects like the reconstruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which Stalin had destroyed in 1931, he makes sure his face is all over the newspapers.


The mayor, who has been declining interview requests from The Moscow Times for more than two years, insists he has no plans to run for president or vie for the post of prime minister.


"We don't even have time to think about that -- we are too busy dealing with issues of city management," said Luzhkov's top spokesman, Sergei Tsoi, a virtuoso spin doctor of a breed still rare in Russia.


For Luzhkov and his army of loyal bureaucrats, that means deciding the fate of nearly every plot of land in a capital city with a population of around 10 million, running scores of city-owned joint ventures, controlling large sectors of the city's consumer market, sweeping kiosks off the streets by the thousands, commanding candy factories to hike production for Christmas and pitching in to collect trash on the weekends.


But it also apparently means visiting Russian sailors in the contested Black Sea Fleet in Ukraine, as Luzhkov did last year, promising to build them an apartment complex on Ukrainian soil -- a project which Tsoi said is moving ahead with city funds -- and stating that the pro-Russian Crimean peninsula "has always been a part of Russia." It means travelling the country to make business deals and likening Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais' privatization program to a drunk selling off his clothing for another drink. And it means introducing regulations for Moscow that aim to keep out or deport would-be residents from the so-called "near abroad" and especially the Caucasus. That kind of move has won him no points with the human rights organization Helsinki Watch, but plenty with the man in the street.


Sensational articles in the Russian press have recently painted Luzhkov as the master of dark, omnipotent forces allegedly tied to powerful businesses like Most Bank and bent on seizing power at any price.Nezavisimaya Gazeta recently said he had managed to seize ownership of "what was once our common property" and concentrate "almost unlimited administrative power and great capital in one pair of hands."


But you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist or a muckraker to argue that he is more than just a mayor -- and that the leap from city hall to the Kremlin is possible.


Technically, he was elected prime minister of the Moscow government on the ticket of former mayor Gavriil Popov in 1991, appointed mayor by Yeltsin in 1992 and, in 1993, named governor of Moscow, which is one of Russia's administrative regions unto itself.


The dissolution of Soviet-era legislatures in October 1993 left Luzhkov the nearly unchallenged ruler of a city government that was created for central economic control and sits on one of Russia's biggest golden eggs: Moscow's real estate and vast commercial market.


This year he convinced Yeltsin to let him run privatization his own way, effectively winning permission to retain that control -- which, some analysts say, could be a major source of campaign revenues.


"If a commercial firm doesn't support Luzhkov, he can encourage city stores not to sign contracts with that firm," said Carnegie's Markov, although he offered no evidence that this has happened.


The lack of a power base outside Moscow, where the wealthy capital is often resented, would probably be Luzhkov's biggest obstacle in an election bid.


He is far more popular among Muscovites than any other politician, according to polls that show his approval rating rose to 46 percent in October from just 21 percent in 1992. But in a recent survey of 3,000 people across Russia, just 1 percent said they trusted Luzhkov, while 8 percent said they trusted Yeltsin, said Vladimir Shokarev of the polling group VTsIOM.


Still, Luzhkov has the wherewithal to mount a mass-media campaign like the one that helped Vladimir Zhirinovsky's party sweep national elections last year -- and a versatile image with appeal for rich "new Russians," apparatchiks and nationalists alike.


Luzhkov's city government runs the Moscow television station, and Russia's only independent television channel, NTV, is funded by a major Luzhkov ally, the Most Group, as is the newspaper Segodnya.


"When we organized a television company, we chose people who share our views. So it is not surprising that NTV would find Luzhkov sympathetic," Most deputy director Sergei Zverev told The Moscow Times last month.


"His image is, 'I am a real manager, not just a talking head,' which is attractive to Russians, who tend toward the belief that politicians just talk and don't do anything," said Markov. "He could say, 'Look how hard it is to run Moscow. I did it. I'll do it for Russia.'"


But the mayor's detractors say Luzhkov's record will in fact weigh him down.


Though Moscow sparkles with new neon signs, Muscovites earn high salaries, and the metro is still running, Anatoly Glushets, deputy head of the Moscow division of the State Antitrust committee says all this is "in spite of Luzhkov, not because of him."


New stores have been slow to replace the kiosks Luzhkov has so zealously uprooted, Glushets said.


And he says his research shows the market meddling that Luzhkov touts as "defending the poor" has in fact pushed inflation in the capital's food and gasoline prices above national levels, whereas it is below average in Moscow's bustling, unregulated clothing market.


But Luzhkov without a doubt has left his mark on the city. And, said Miljenko Horvat, president of Citibank in Moscow, "anyone who gets things done here by definition separates themselves from the pack."