Flamboyantly headlined, "Snow Is Falling: Will the President and Government Fall Too?" the article accused Luzhkov of funneling city funds to Most Bank, blamed the bank for last month's ruble crash, and said the two had teamed up to take over the media, whether with money or with physical intimidation.
The mayor and his closest advisers met Monday shortly after the article appeared and pronounced it "a malicious provocation" and "intentionally insulting to the activities of the Moscow government," according to minutes shown to The Moscow Times.
"It is slander. There is not one word of truth in it," said Most Bank spokeswoman Tatyana Brilyakova on Tuesday.
Brilyakova said that the Most Group, the consortium centered on Most Bank, plans to sue Rossiiskaya Gazeta. In addition, Moscow television also plans to sue over the article's statement that it is owned by Most Bank, a news announcer said Monday night. Luzhkov, who has won damages in more than 10 libel suits, is also weighing court action, said his top legal adviser, Sergei Dontsov.
"Let them sue if they want to," said Mikhail Nikolayev, the newspaper's deputy editor. "It's a well-known pastime of politicians in this country -- suing journalists."
The accusations, few of which were sourced, are not particularly new; newspapers from the extremist Zavtra to the respectable Literaturnaya Gazeta have attempted to pinpoint an unholy alliance between Luzhkov and Most Bank.
But their appearance in Rossiiskaya Gazeta, which is linked to the federal government, raised a new question: Did someone close to the government finally get fed up with recent rumors that Luzhkov, backed by the rich and powerful Most Group, was angling to replace Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin or President Boris Yeltsin?
The government has no direct control over the editorial matter in Rossiiskaya Gazeta under post-Soviet law, said media lawyer Leonid Rozhetskin.
But the paper's status as official publisher of government decrees lends its editorial line "a certain color" of officialdom, he said.
Federal government spokesman Vartan Ovsepyan said the "sensational" article, which blames Luzhkov and Most for a recent rumor that Chernomyrdin had resigned, did not represent government policy.
But Ovsepyan suggested that big ambitions on Luzhkov's part might not be welcome. "It's a bad soldier that doesn't want to become a general," he said. "But I think Luzhkov understands his place. He can't act without thinking seriously about his immediate future."
Nikolayev, the deputy editor, called the article "one version of events."
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