Russia: Moscow's hard past, present and future: Joy of business Western style: The Congress of People's Deputies today is billed as a showdown between 'Westernisers' and conservatives. Our Moscow staff consider life after Communism

HIS OFFICE has potted ferns, moulded leather chairs and a huge black desk big enough to hold a bronze nude, a talking alarm clock, mounds of papers and two portable phones - a bulky black one for his car, a sleek white one for the pocket of his pinstripe suit.

Everything is imported. The only thing Russian in the room is a model of Stalin's limousine and the din of Russian voices blaring from four television sets along the wall, left permanently turned on.

'Our model is America's Republican Party. Like them, we are a party that supports business,' says Konstantin Baravoy, 44, the boisterous, chain-smoking - Marlboro, of course - founder, financer and leader of Russia's Economic Freedom Party.

A former mathematician and computer programmer, Mr Baravoy decided to move into politics six months ago after making a fortune in a string of business ventures. His most recent money- maker was the Russian Commodities and Raw Materials Exchange, which, like his new party, he helped set up with his own money and ran according to his own demanding hyperactive rhythms. His biography lists only one hobby: work.

He was raised and educated in Moscow during the dreariest years of Brezhnevite stagnation. His restless ambition and flamboyant tastes, though, belong to the Bonfire of the Vanities, far more American than Russian.

'I like to set things up,' he says. 'When they succeed I move on. If something works it is boring.'

Mr Baravoy is extreme in every way, a habit that has stirred deep resentment. His flat has been bombed; last month, during a by- election campaign in Krasnodarsk, an unprimed hand-grenade was left in the hall where he was due to speak. Attached to it was a note: 'Next time it will go off.'

Even liberal intellectuals, who like to think of themselves as standing on the Western side of a perpetual Russian debate about how to modernise going back to Peter the Great, are shocked by Mr Baravoy's energy and rampant materialism. But this is his value: he forces people to think about what they really want, to see that reform needs and brings a lot more than pretty slogans.

'Its not difficult to make a concentration camp out of a country but it is very difficult to make concentration camps into a country,' he says. 'The real problem is people's mentality. For this generation politics is still a game. Only with the next generation can we have a normal life.'

His new party - 'our aim is power' - claims to have 200,000 members with 170 regional sections scattered across Russia. Some two dozen members of the Congress of People's Deputies have allied themselves with the party and Mr Baravoy predicts many more will follow. The party's emblem is made up of seven coloured stripes representing the shades of the rainbow. It is meant to signal the party's broad appeal but it is the green of dollar bills that unifies his supporters. 'Politics is made with money,' he says.