Populist Moscow mayor found future blocked by rapid rise of Vladimir Putin

He rebutted corruption allegations with libel writs, each issued with victory virtually assured in a compliant judicial system.

Before the rise of Vladimir Putin, Yuri Luzhkov was Russia’s most consistently successful post-Soviet politician. Appointed mayor of Moscow in 1992 by Boris Yeltsin, Luzhkov transformed the capital into a city which, despite its many faults, did at least prosper while the rest of the country suffered.

Unlike Yeltsin, his perennial ally, Luzhkov, who became known informally as Moscow’s tsar, never suffered significant unpopularity among his electorate. In the 1996 mayoral election he won a plausible 95 per cent of votes.

He also initiated a ferocious building boom, leaving much of the capital unrecognisable as the monochrome city ruled by

Stalin and his successors. Much of this was achieved by alleged close alignment with organised crime.

Luzhkov, who has died aged 83 during heart surgery, was a bald and muscular teetotaller who demonstrably enjoyed football, boxing, tennis and horse-riding. He found it easy to play the populist, masquerading in workers’ caps in city factories. Dynamic he certainly was; in his youth colleagues had likened him to Benito Mussolini. Luzhkov could charm at multiple levels. Having glad-handed the workers, he was also capable of immediately switching social cultures to entertain business moguls in scenes of outlandish opulence. His personal fortune was calculated by some experts to exceed US$400 million.

He owed his ascent to Yeltsin, who was head of the Moscow communist party when in

1987 Luzhkov became first deputy chairman of the capital’s executive committee. In 1990 he was promoted to head that body and within

12 months he had become deputy to Gavriil Popov, Moscow’s first directly elected mayor.

Popov resigned in June 1992. Having earned Yeltsin’s loyalty for support during the

1991 coup attempt, Luzhkov was handed the top Moscow job by Kremlin appointment. Once installed, he swiftly eased food shortages and solidified his power over the hitherto fractious city legislature. By 1993 he controlled the levers of Moscow security to the extent that his support was critical as Yeltsin again sought victory over armed rivals, now in the Russian parliament.

Luzhkov’s command over the city government lasted the decade. His building ambitions extended on a grand scale to the restoration of historical monuments, notably the spending of an estimated US$300m of city funds on rebuilding the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which had been bulldozed by Stalin in 1931 and where the band Pussy Riot staged their infamous protest in 2012.

Yeltsin apart, the favours returned by corporate moguls constituted the real linchpin of his power. Yeltsin had granted Moscow a valuable exemption from the

Kremlin’s nationwide privatisation scheme. Instead Luzhkov designed his own divestment programme, selling public assets, mainly to his close associates. He rebutted corruption allegations with libel writs, each issued with victory virtually assured in a compliant judicial system.

Despite such abuse of power, Luzhkov remained popular with Moscow residents. He gave most of them material reasons to remain loyal: public housing remained cheap, while heating and phone charges were subsidised. He maintained Soviet-style residence permits, and outsiders attempting to build new lives in the capital were forcibly removed.

By 1999 he was a plausible contender to succeed Yeltsin. Yet like every other presidential hopeful, his star imploded when in August 1999 Yeltsin suddenly promoted Putin to be prime minister and, subsequently, acting president. Thereafter Luzhkov faded, forced to pledge obedience to the new president, with whom relations remained fragile. He astonished liberals by reversing an earlier stance and calling for the restoration of the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka (later the KGB). It was, he said, an ‘‘excellent monument’’ to a man who had, among his other activities, ‘‘solved the problem of homeless children’’. In September

2010, he was fired by President Medvedev. Yuri Mikhailovich Luzhkov was born in Moscow. His father was a carpenter and his mother a factory worker. He took pride in his ‘‘hooligan’’ roots in the deserted construction sites of Stalin’s Moscow.

In 1958 he married Marina Bashilova. She died in 1989. Two years later he married Elena Baturina, the first Russian woman to amass a billion-dollar fortune. She moved to London in

2011 because of ‘‘political difficulties’’. Recently she was declared a ‘‘fugitive’’ in Russia for failing to attend a libel trial.

She survives him with their two daughters, and two sons from his first marriage.