VLADIVOSTOK, Far East -- This city's mayor, a former submarine captain who once guarded the Soviet Union from foreign enemies, is so afraid for his life that he never leaves his office.


For Victor Cherepkov, 51, the enemy these days lurks not on the high seas, but just a few blocks away from City Hall, where he believes the province's governor, Yevgeny Nazdratenko, and his cronies want to do him in.


"I have already been living in my office for four months, and I won't go home lest they blow up my apartment," said Cherepkov, a short, balding man with thick glasses. "It would be easier for me to live in prison than in the condition I'm now living under."


Over the past year, Cherepkov said, his opponents have shot at him three times, smashed his car, spilled mercury in the corridors of City Hall, and just three weeks ago trumped up evidence that he took a 1.2 million ruble (about $715,000) bribe.


The usually dapper mayor of Russia's main city of the Far East now spends most of his days wearing a T-shirt and resting under a blanket in a small stuffy room next to his office.


All the confrontation has caused him heart problems, he said, but he still refuses to leave for the hospital because he fears his enemies might finish him off under the guise of medical care.


The fight appears to be over power, rather than ideology.


For many observers, the standoff in Vladivostok, a major port 9,350 kilometers east of Moscow, is just one in a series of soap operas nationwide in which Russian reformers, separated more by personality than politics, squander their energy fighting each other rather than teaming together to lead the country out of depression.


"It recalls the fight between Yeltsin and Khasbulatov," said Nikolai Zaika, president of the local journalists' association, comparing the tension between Vladivostok's mayor and governor to the political struggle last year between President Boris Yeltsin and the former parliament speaker, Ruslan Khasbulatov.


In recent weeks, the fight has turned ugly. In an attempt to destroy the mayor politically, a man identified by police only as Volkov, head of a local Afghanistan War veterans group, met twice with the mayor in February and then went to police announcing he had bribed the mayor and top aides. Not only that, he recorded the serial numbers on the bills to prove it.


"I honestly don't know today whether he took the bribe or whether it was a set up," said Public Prosecutor Vyacheslav Yaroshenko. "On the one hand, the man said he gave six bribes, and we found all these bribes. But on the other hand we know that the mayor is in a power struggle and has a lot of enemies."


With her son in police custody and husband ill, Cherepkov's wife, Valentina, decided to move into city hall as well, creating a homey touch to what should be the administrative center of this city of 650,000.


"What else can I do?" she asked. "I must prepare food for him here and supervise his medicines."


The mayor's opponents in the downtown skyscraper, dubbed the local White House, deny any involvement in the bribery scandal. They equally deny the mayor's assertion that they prepared a multi-option plan to destroy him politically.


"It seems pretty strange to me," said First Deputy Governor Valentin Dubinin. "We just don't have any local tradition of lying around the office when sick, especially if it is a heart condition."


Dubinin makes no bones about his desire to see the mayor leave office, and he openly calls him "inexperienced" and "incompetent." Asked for an example of the mayor's lack of leadership, he cited the city's failure to meet the plan in harvesting potatoes last year.


Cherepkov, who was popularly elected last year and says he has the mandate of the people, is in favor of reform and opening up to the West. Nazdratenko, the governor,favors many of the same goals.


Among the issues dividing the two sides are how to solve the city's power shortages which cause daily blackouts of one or two hours a day.


Yet, perhaps more than substance, the real issue seems to be one of style, with a brash stubborn newcomer as mayor rubbing the experienced politicians around the governor the wrong way.


For now the mayor vows he will not back down in the confrontation.


"They have no evidence, it's absurd. Nobody believes them," Cherepkov said defiantly. "I will keep living here until the situation stabilizes."