In many a Moscow office, the secretary sits in the hall where guests once donned obligatory slippers to avoid tracking mud into the living room. The boss's study was once a bedroom, and the staff cooks up lunch in the fully equipped kitchen.


But businesspeople beware: If your office is in an apartment, you could soon be evicted by the Moscow government, which plans to kick out all business tenants from privatized apartments, Nikolai Maslov, a city housing official, said Monday.


With central Moscow office space scarce and pricey, business tenants -- from small new Russian and foreign businesses to internationally known law and accounting firms -- have turned in droves to the many Muscovites looking to make a profit on newly privatized apartments.


But the growing number of makeshift apartment-offices has sparked a deluge of complaints from neighbors annoyed by frequent visitors and deliveries, Moscow government spokesman Yury Zagrebnoi said in a recent interview.


City officials have already evicted 152 businesses from apartments and slated over 600 more for removal, Zagrebnoi said. Working with police and local inspectors, they plan to kick out thousands more or pressure landlords to do the evicting themselves, he said.


First to go will be obviously obtrusive businesses such as the several currency exchanges and warehouses already discovered in apartments -- but quiet consultancies are just as illegal and will eventually be evicted, Maslov said. A notable exception are tenants of UPDK diplomatic complexes, including many news organizations, which get a reprieve until UPDK manages to build a special new office building.


People running small businesses from their residential apartments will be left alone as long as they do not bother neighbors, Maslov said.


Business tenants, who refused to be identified for fear of being discovered, said they considered the sweeping evictions unfair because there is not enough commercial space to pick up the slack.


"Today you just cannot -- period -- to find an office that is a reasonable price," said Moscow realtor Michael Oster, who said commercial landlords often demand a year's rent in advance at up to $900 per square meter. "It's going to mean that small to medium-size businesses can't participate in the Russian market."


"It's true, office space is very expensive," said Maslov, deputy head of the Moscow housing department, which is overseeing the drive. "But our task is to protect the supply of housing. We have an extreme shortage of housing."


Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov has promised to honor Soviet-era state housing waiting lists, where some Muscovites have languished for over a decade.


Some businesspeople supported the move. "There should be some form of zoning, like there is everywhere else in the world, said Christopher MackNee of Star Technology, an Australian mining company which was already planning to move to commercial space when city officials called with a warning. "Tell me, if it was your apartment back home, and you had all sorts of people coming and going at all hours, would you like it?" MackNee said.


Office apartments were always illegal, but a March mayoral decree declared landlords could lose improperly used privatized apartments, and a September decree forbids the registering of new firms at residential addresses, Zagrebnoi said.