Even before President Yeltsin was rushed to hospital with pneumonia on Sunday, it was understood that the battle for control of the country had begun, and begun where it usually begins - in the boardrooms of TV studios, radio stations and newspaper offices. Last week, a group of strange and unwelcome visitors arrived at the headquarters of Russian Public Television, known as ORT, the biggest TV channel in the former Soviet Union. They were bailiffs, come to enforce a court order to seize property for payment of debts.
After a few awkward hours in which the channel's news bulletins went off the air, the bailiffs were persuaded to leave. The political analyst Andrei Piontkowski said the bailiffs' arrival had been muscle-flexing by the government, under the Prime Minister, Mr Yevgeny Primakov - a warning to the country's highly partisan media. A sudden raid by sanitary inspectors on Moscow's best news radio station, Echo Moskvy, had, he claimed, been carried out with the same purpose in mind.
"The authorities wanted to demonstrate that they had certain levers," he said. "Everyone is manoeuvring now in expectation of early presidential elections."
Even Mr Yeltsin's bitterest critics, the communist-nationalists in parliament, would prefer him to hang on until his term expires in 2000, he said. But the latest hospitalisation will mean the revving up of campaign engines which have been idling noisily ever since the financial crisis broke in August.
ORT is a barometer of power in Russia. Firmly pro-Yeltsin in the early 1990s, scene of a bloody battle which ended in victory for Yeltsinite forces over parliament in 1993, loyally lying for the Kremlin during the Chechen war, it was handed over by Mr Yeltsin to a group of tycoons in 1995 in part-exchange for their backing in his re-election campaign. During the deal, its director, a much-loved journalist, was murdered.
Now, with Mr Yeltsin chronically sick, the Russian government - which formally owns the channel - is putting pressure on its bosses and the man who de facto controls them, the controversial billionaire, Mr Boris Berezovsky. The signs are that Mr Berezovsky is backing the neo-Gaullist Gen Alexander Lebed to replace the fading Mr Yeltsin.
The Kremlin said yesterday that the President was likely to stay in hospital for at least a week. His condition was described as stable and his temperature normal.