Moscow's mayor Mr Yuri Luzhkov thumbed his nose at President Yeltsin right under the noses of the Kremlin leaders, writes Seamus Martin.
Last night on the Vasielievsky Slope, which leads from St Basil's Cathedral on Red Square down to the Moskva River, he rallied his forces to show the Prime Minister, Mr Vladimir Putin, that he was still Moscow's most popular politician.
Mr Luzhkov, with the former Prime Minister, Mr Yevgeny Primakov, leads the non-communist anti-Yeltsin grouping Fatherland-All Russia (OVR) which has been taking a pasting from pro-government TV stations in the run-up to Sunday's parliamentary elections.
A crowd of more than 50,000, enormous by the standards of today's Moscow where political apathy has become the norm, gathered under the Kremlin carrying banners reading: "Hands off Luzhkov," "Keep Moscow in Safe Hands" and "We are with you, Luzhkov".
If Mr Yeltsin was listening behind the Kremlin walls, his blood pressure must have risen to boiling point when movie director and nationalist Duma deputy Mr Stanislav Govorukhin launched into a fierce attack on the president and his supporters.
"A sick president sits behind the Kremlin's crenellations surrounded by people with criminal histories who didn't just rob a kiosk or a shop, but robbed a whole country," Mr Govorukhin said to the applause of the crowd.
Mr Luzhkov will be opposed for the Moscow mayoralty by Mr Pavel Borodin, the administrator of the Kremlin complex. Mr Borodin was under investigation for corruption in relation to links with a Swiss construction firm. The company, Mabetex, won a number of lucrative contracts for refurbishing office buildings under the Kremlin's control.
The same Swiss company, run by a Kosovo-Albanian businessman, Mr Behget Pacolli, has been accused of organising credit-card accounts for Mr Yeltsin and his daughters through which bills of $87,000 were run up.
The investigations effectively came to an end when Mr Yeltsin sacked the prosecutor-general, Mr Yuri Skuratov, after pro-government TV showed a man who looked him in bed with two young prostitutes.
Mr Luzhkov, a tough street-fighter of a politician, has been the focus of vicious attacks by pro-government TV stations, particularly from political anchorman Sergei Dorenko, who has openly accused the mayor of complicity in the murder of an American businessman in Moscow in 1996.
Acting almost as the head of an independent republic, Mr Luzh kov has opted out of many of the Russian Federation's initiatives. He has run his own economic programme rather than support that of the former privatisation minister, Mr Anatoly Chubais.