REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : Tale of ‘Official Lover’ Spices Up Russian Congress’ Session

Don’t let them fool you. They may look like a flock of somber, gray-suited, gray-haired, gray-skinned former Communists, but members of the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies now meeting in Moscow have their wilder side as well.

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The Congress enjoyed a sex scandal this session--quite a juicy one for gossips who have had little to chew over since President Boris N. Yeltsin ended up in a river under very curious circumstances--reputedly connected with a woman--in 1989.

Speaking from the podium, Nikolai Travkin, the popular chairman of the Democratic Party of Russia, addressed the “intrigues” developing at the Congress. Rumor had it, he said, that he was plotting a coup together with sharp-tongued Parliament Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov.

Or even, Travkin went on, that he and Khasbulatov shared a mistress.

“Khasbulatov managed to seduce her, but Travkin was found lacking his southern spirit,” Travkin said in a reference to Khasbulatov’s origins in southern Russia’s Caucasus Mountains.

Travkin, a wiry former construction worker, was referring to a splashy story that appeared in the weekly Sobesednik, in which a 23-year-old brunette, pictured centerfold-style in a revealing mini, described getting drunk and sleeping with Khasbulatov. Travkin, she claimed, had offered her the post of his “official lover.”

Travkin’s self-deprecating description of his reported lack of appeal raised a roar of laughter from deputies, but most interesting of all was that he never actually denied the woman’s story, perhaps calculating that tales of hanky-panky generally only enhance a Russian politician’s reputation.

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As more than 1,000 lawmakers met in the Kremlin, a far more sinister and colorful group was holding its own congress a few miles away.

According to police reports, 66 underworld dons gathered in a suburban Moscow motel to divvy up turf and generally get their organized crime more organized. Even the “Russian Mafia abroad” was represented, the newspaper Izvestia said.

Little did the crime bosses suspect, however, that Moscow’s brave boys in blue were in the know on their pow-wow--until their dinner was raided by 150 latter-day Untouchables who pulled them all in.

The raid was carried off so skillfully that “not one glass was broken” in the restaurant where the chieftains met over dinner, Izvestia said.

Police said the meeting included heads of such a wide variety of mobs that it was unprecedented in its scope, a worrying signal that the Russian underworld is growing more powerful and structured.

The widely publicized raid fit in well with complaints at the Congress of People’s Deputies about Russia’s skyrocketing crime rate. Unfortunately, police acknowledged, for all its beauty, the raid only yielded them three cases that may stick in court.

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The Congress of People’s Deputies reached an emotional peak on Thursday. Verbal sparring suddenly turned physical as dozens of deputies charged into a rough-and-tumble pushing match at the front of their splendorous hall in the Kremlin’s Grand Kremlin Palace.

Onlookers watched wide-eyed, and one well-prepared man in the balcony peered through a long spyglass at the scuffle. It was an amazing scene: a slight, bespectacled physicist--Anatoly Shabad, now dubbed “Rambo” by the Russian press corps--and his colleagues teetering on the edge of an outright brawl.

Some deputies were upset and disgusted as they emerged from the hall a few minutes later, but others appeared downright exhilarated, even if they had not participated in the melee. Among them was Vladimir Lukin, Russia’s ambassador to the United States.

“I have a degree in boxing, you know,” the diminutive, scholarly Lukin boasted.

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Such antics on the part of lawmakers might shock some Russians--if they were not absolutely cynical about the Congress already.

“What is going on there is an absolute disgrace,” said Nina Sapunova, 45, a Moscow painter. “It’s horrible. They’ve tortured us to death. They should all be shot--all of them, the opposition and the government.”

“When we watch the Congress on television we get sick,” she said.

Most Russians are not quite as extreme as Sapunova. In fact, most Russians appear to pay little attention at all to their highest legislative body.

In the Ural Mountains’ Sverdlovsk Region, pollsters asked 600 residents what they thought of their lawmakers’ performance. Only 18% of them could even name their deputies.

In the city of Ekaterinburg, 113 people out of 120 polled did not remember whom they had voted for in the 1990 elections to the Congress, and 60% had no idea what their deputies did, the Russian Information Agency reported.

Past sessions have commanded more attention, but now that Russians are seeing their Seventh Congress, the endless hours of motions and counter-motions have about as much appeal as U.S. Congress sessions carried uncut on cable television.

“We used to follow their initial moves,” said Andrei Shalimov, a Moscow architect. “Now, we are fed up with it. The general impression of the Congress is normal. This Congress reminds me of many other ones. Maybe it would be better if the Congress did not take place at all.”

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The strangest of political bedfellows, dozens and sometimes hundreds of them, gather below St. Basil’s Cathedral each day to chant and brandish their signs at deputies going to and from the Kremlin.

On Saturday, engineer Vladimir Sergeyev was there with his black-white-and-yellow czarist flag, and pensioner Nelli Sizova stood nearby waving her blood-red banner of the Soviet Communist era.

Sergeyev, representing Russia’s nationalist Far Right, said he wanted deputies to heed his warnings that “we have practically no Russians in the Kremlin”--only Jews and other “foreigners” who, he said, care nothing for Russia’s welfare.

He had “real Jewish names” for everyone from Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev to foreign intelligence chief Yevgeny M. Primakov and Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov.

“Yeltsin is a second Lenin,” Sergeyev warned. “He hates Russians too.”

Sizova, representing Russia’s Far Left, held her red flag aloft and toted a carryall embroidered with “Yankee, Go Away.” She was motivated not by hatred but by tremendous nostalgia.

“We want our ideology to be Communist,” she said. “When I was young, you could hand in your passport at the park as surety and take skis or skates and just glide all day. For free!”

“Now,” Sizova said, “only the gang at the top lives luxuriously and gets to eat bananas. Once, we all ate bananas.”