MOSCOW : A Russian First
Russian voters go to the polls Wednesday to directly elect three of the most powerful men in their republic--the Russian president and the mayors of Moscow and Leningrad.
In a land run previously by czars and Communist apparatchiks, leaders of the radical reform movement who have quit the Communist Party are expected to win all three posts. Opinion polls indicate that populist Boris N. Yeltsin, the current leader of the Soviet Union’s largest republic, has a healthly lead on all of his five opponents for the Russian presidency.
The current leader of Moscow’s city council, Gavriil Popov, is also the front-runner for the job of Moscow mayor, and the head of Leningrad’s city council, Anatoly A. Sobchak, has no serious opponents for the post of mayor of Leningrad.
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