The right took the telegraph
And control the movement of the globe
Yesterday, a presentation of the Moscow election headquarters of the Union of Right Forces (SPS) took place in the Central Telegraph building on Tverskaya Street. The headquarters will deal with both Duma and mayoral elections. Now Mayor Luzhkov will not be too comfortable in his main residence - the Mossovet building on Tverskaya: literally in the next house, the right-wingers will take him apart every day.

The premises that the capital's rightists have chosen as their headquarters look less like an official press center and more like a place for an underground gathering. They settled down in the room where the globe control mechanism is located on the facade of the Central Telegraph. The presentation participants were quite in keeping with the surroundings: sitting at a table with microphones, they democratically hung their jackets with the emblem of the Union of Right Forces on nails in the wall. Next to Kiriyenko sat a lover of antisocial performances, Marat Gelman, and the “critical sentimentalist” Timur Kibirov, who immediately after the press conference, without answering any questions from journalists (who jokingly suggested that it was he who had been commissioned to write the “Right Cause” anthem), gloomily began to open the bottle vodka. Which he shared in a brotherly way with everyone.
Having captured the Central Telegraph, the rightists thus dug in two houses from the Mossovet building on Tverskaya, Luzhkov’s main residence. Kiriyenko came up with a slogan for the headquarters: “facing the city, back to the mayor.” The most fascinating part of yesterday's presentation was indeed the “Moscow sagas” of Sergei Kiriyenko, gleaned from communication with Muscovites complaining about local authorities: for example, he found out that for the treatment of a flower bed measuring 6 acres in the Olympic Village, the capital’s authorities pay 41 thousand rubles a month .
The majority of the SPS leaders themselves are convinced that Sergei Kiriyenko has no chance of defeating Luzhkov in the mayoral elections; nevertheless, they consider the Moscow rostrum “effective for promoting liberal values in parliamentary elections.” However, Vyacheslav Glazychev (speaking in conjunction with Kiriyenko as a candidate for vice-mayor) optimistically told reporters that “Kiriyenko’s team is working to win.” And that in fact, the ex-prime minister is fighting against the “communist mayor Valery Shantsev,” who threatens Moscow if Luzhkov’s presidential ambitions come true. It should be noted that even Yuri Luzhkov himself probably considers such a forecast to be overly optimistic in the current situation.

ELENA Kommersant-TREGUBOVA

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 194 dated 10/22/1999, p. 2