They sprouted as prolifically as mushrooms after a rainstorm, and disappeared as quickly and mysteriously. The campaign posters plastered around Moscow with fanatic zeal in the run-up to elections have largely vanished as though they never existed.


At the height of election fever, the posters, especially those for Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin's Our Home Is Russia party, became controversial over financing, and targets of sneering over their aesthetics.


But now that it's all over, the rapid removal of the posters testifies that regardless of the outcome of the elections, Moscow remains, for the time being at least, firmly capitalist.


"Every day means money," said Igor Bronin, general director of the Simon agency, which handled poster advertising for Our Home Is Russia, Yegor Gaidar and Gavril Popov. "The posters were paid for up to the 16th, so why should we keep them up? We need them for our other clients."


A stern-looking Chernomyrdin has now been replaced by the agency's own house ads announcing advertising space for rent. Bronin said corporate clients like Levis, Gillette and McDonalds would soon fill the space.


The Central Election Commission's rules have also contributed to the prompt disappearance of election material from Moscow.


"Campaign advertising was officially forbidden from Nov. 17," said Galina Shvets, deputy director of the city government's Department of Print and Information, responsible for monitoring the capital's monster poster campaign. "It's in the parties' own interest to have the posters taken down as quickly as possible in order to stay within the rules."


She said her department had made several calls Sunday and Monday to speed up tardy advertising firms.


Though the practice of "flyposting" was against the rules, many smaller parties seem to have sent out teams of supporters armed with buckets of paste and rolls of posters, avoiding high central Moscow advertising rates.


But with allegations of large-scale violations of spending guidelines by major parties apparently overlooked, small-scale dodges such as flyposting are unlikely to be punished, leaving the city government to clean up.