MOSCOW — A year ago, Yelena Baturina unveiled the grandest plan yet in a building career that has remapped swaths of Moscow. It was called Project Orange, an avant-garde Norman Foster complex shaped like slices of fruit, with a tinted facade that would cast an orange glow over the Moscow River.

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Yelena Baturina seeks a loan for her construction company.

Last week, in a sign of the extraordinary times, Ms. Baturina applied for about $1.4 billion in government loan guarantees for her construction company, Inteko. The fortunes of Ms. Baturina, a onetime factory worker, had soared along with those of her powerful husband, Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov of Moscow. She is Russia’s richest woman, with a personal fortune that Forbes magazine estimated in 2008 at $4.2 billion.

Reports of oligarchs seeking financial aid have come to sound commonplace this year, and it is hard to detect much reaction, let alone outrage, among Muscovites. But Ms. Baturina’s request did capture some attention, particularly among those who took a dim view of the city’s recent building boom.

“It’s effrontery,” said Sergei S. Mitrokhin, an opposition lawmaker in Moscow’s city legislature. “She has no understanding of ordinary life, or ordinary people. She lives in her own golden world, from which she looks out at the reality that surrounds her, and of which she has no understanding.”

In a statement, Inteko said it would use the government loans to expand its manufacturing base, replacing obsolete cement factories and other facilities throughout Russia. After hearing the request, a working group at Russia’s Ministry for Economic Development asked the company to return in two weeks with a more detailed analysis of how the money would be spent.

Ms. Baturina disappeared from Forbes’s annual ranking of billionaires this year, along with the eight other Russian developers who had appeared there. It has been a grim season for Russia’s construction titans, as credit has vanished and real estate prices have gone into a swoon.

Banks are facing the problem of whether to accept half-finished construction projects as collateral, and brand-new offices — planned when high-end commercial spaces were selling for $2,000 per square meter — are standing empty.

Vladimir Pantyushin, a Moscow real estate analyst, said the government would be well advised to step in, despite the “shock of having a gold mine and seeing it in front of your door asking for money.” Otherwise, he said, major developers may begin defaulting on loans, sending panic rippling through the market.

“We are near the borderline,” said Mr. Pantyushin, the head of economic and strategic research for Jones Lang LaSalle, a global real estate firm. “We really are in danger of facing major bankruptcies.”

Ms. Baturina, 46, is one of Russia’s few female industrialists. Inteko, the company she founded in 1991, made plastics, including cups and dishes for one Mr. Luzhkov’s pet projects, a fast-food chain called Russkoye Bistro. In 1997, the company won a major contract to produce 82,000 plastic seats for Luzhniki Stadium.

As high-rise condominiums and office buildings crowded into Moscow, Ms. Baturina became a billionaire and a power broker. Mr. Luzhkov has lashed out at billionaires who “bought yachts and luxury items” during the boom years, and said “incompetents working for big money — that is one of the causes of the crisis.” More recently, though, he has spoken in favor of nationalizing construction companies, “not in order to pursue state capitalism, but in order to minimize the pain of surviving this period, and restore those sectors to a normal financial condition.”

Ms. Baturina’s application drew scant notice on television, but dozens of angry readers sent in comments to online news sources, complaining of “thieves” and “mobsters” and “brash gamblers.” One reader, who identified herself as Lyubov, said she would like to ask Ms. Baturina for “at least 100,000 rubles,” about $2,900.

“It is so difficult to live on my 4,000-ruble pension,” she wrote. “I have forgotten the smell of apples.”