Liberal economist Grigory Yavlinsky, long the odd man out in Russian politics, suddenly seems to be picking up support among media and financial elites as well as in the country's regions.

In the past month, Yavlinsky has won a public endorsement from one of Russia's most high-profile media tycoons and from a powerful regional governor, and has seen his party dominate St. Petersburg local district elections. The developments are significant since media access, campaign financing and support from regional leaders are the main factors that win elections.

Earlier this month, financial and media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky - founder of the MOST-Group media and financial empire including MOST-Bank; the television station NTV; the Ekho-Moskvy radio station; the national daily newspaper Segodnya and the weekly newsmagazine Itogi - pledged to back Yavlinsky in the 1999 parliamentary elections "to the maximum."

"Everything that I can do, I will. That is not a secret," said Gusinsky.

Gusinsky's support, together with the rest of Russia's financial and media elite, was crucial to President Boris Yeltsin's come-from-behind victory in the 1996 elections. Yavlinsky has already declared his intention to run in the next presidential elections, due to take place in the year 2000.

Yeltsin's 1996 media support was organized by First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais, then Yeltsin's campaign manager. But since then, the once unified media-financial oligarchy has split and descended into an ugly public feud after Uneximbank won a privatization auction for the massive telecommunications giant Svyazinvest.

Most notably, Gusinsky and Russia's other media mogul Boris Berezovsky - who controls ORT Russian Public Television - have broken with Chubais, who they consider a stooge of Uneximbank chairman Vladimir Potanin.

Gusinsky said Chubais had compromised himself as a government official by lobbying for the interests of Uneximbank.

"For me, Anatoly Borisovich is not a deputy prime minister; he is rather one of my competitors. He represents one of my competitors - Uneximbank," Gusinsky said. "That is wrong. I believe that no representative of the government should represent the interests of one or another enterprise, be that a bank or an industrial group."

But analysts say that neither Gusinsky nor any of Russia's other tycoons are prepared to hand the presidency to Yavlinsky, but instead are planning to support Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.

"This is a consolation prize," said Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the Center for Strategic Studies, a Moscow-based political think-tank. "Both Gusinsky and Berezovsky have already decided that they will support Chernomyrdin for president in 2000 but they want to keep Yavlinsky in the game as the leader of a democratic opposition."

Piontkovsky said that barring any changes to the current election laws, the next Duma should have two big factions: Yabloko and the Communists, with both Vladimir Zhirinovsky's nationalist Liberal Democratic Party and Chernomyrdin's pro-government Our Home Is Russia falling from the picture.