Voters Are the Wild Card in Russian Election

Vera Yevseyeva’s withered apple of a face wrinkled deeper in indignant confusion. “How can I know beforehand who I’m going to vote for?” she demanded. “I’ll only find out when I go and vote!”

In her indecision and plans for ballot-box spontaneity, the venerable janitor of the Klimov Motor Factory typifies many of the Russian masses voting today on a new constitution and candidates for a new Parliament.

Faced with an unfamiliar array of fledgling parties and blocs, a complex fan of paper ballots and a constitution most have not even skimmed, Russia’s 107 million voters are very much a wild card in this round of the post-Soviet political game.

“The elections of Dec. 12 may bring unexpected surprises,” reported sociologist Nugzar Betaneli, whose Institute of the Sociology of Parliamentarism polled 6,000 Russians across the country. “Take heed: Voters’ sympathy for the democrats’ opposition is higher in the provinces than Moscow imagines.”

His pollsters found that although more than 60% of Russia’s electorate planned to cast their ballots today, a whopping 70% of those had not made a final decision by early this month on how they will vote.

At stake is Russia’s political future. Today’s elections will determine the shape of the Parliament that is to replace the Supreme Soviet dissolved by President Boris N. Yeltsin. Today’s referendum also will decide whether the constitution Yeltsin backs will become the country’s new charter.

But many Russian voters, tossed and tumbled by reforms and disappointed by democracy, approached the balloting with more indifference than concern. The heady days of the first free Soviet elections in 1989, 1990 and 1991 have given way now to the humdrum feel of just one more campaign.

“It’s become a thing that has to be done, like going to the dentist and fixing your teeth,” accountant Timur Urusov said.

Valentina Sirotkina, head of the quality-control department of the Pobeda (Victory) construction materials factory in the St. Petersburg suburb of Kolpino, observed: “We do less politics now and spend more time on work. Our prosperity depends more on our working harder than on choosing the right candidate.”

That, said sociologist Leonid Kesselman, is a positive kind of indifference.

“It’s the understanding that you shouldn’t expect so much from our leaders,” he said. “It’s a sober view. People are finally starting to understand that their well-being doesn’t depend on the government.”

He divided the population into four groups: about 25% whose lives have improved since Yeltsin launched his economic reforms in late 1991; 25% whose lives have stayed about the same; 30% whose standard of living has worsened drastically, and 20% whose lives are slightly worse.

So “half the population are natural supporters of the continuation of the reforms,” Kesselman said.

But Kesselman, who makes no secret about his support for the pro-Yeltsin Russia’s Choice bloc, appeared to err on the side of optimism. Other predictions are far less favorable for Russia’s Choice. Even Yeltsin’s allies tend to worry aloud that all the pro-reform parties combined could fail to gain a majority in the new Federal Assembly. The fate of the constitution is also in doubt.

The Interfax news agency Saturday quoted Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin as saying that Yeltsin could introduce “presidential rule” in Russia if the proposed new charter fails. Later, after a meeting between Chernomyrdin and Yeltsin, the prime minister’s spokesman called the report “completely absurd.”

The publication of polls in the final days of the campaign is barred by law, making predictions even harder. But sociologist Betaneli hazarded a prognosis that Russia’s Choice will, at best, get about 16% of the vote, and could be outstripped by the nationalist demagogue Vladimir Zhirinovsky, top scorer according to the survey at a probable 17%.

In a transparent last-minute bid for support from the elderly, whose fixed incomes have shrunk radically under his reforms, Yeltsin decreed Saturday that pensions for everyone over 62 will be raised. He also promised greater benefits for families with children.

But, “Of course, there are no grounds for any special optimism,” said Alexander Belyayev, chairman of the St. Petersburg City Council. “The economy is not in very good condition, salaries are pretty low and, because of the very cold winter, we’ve had to switch over to a regime of energy conservation, so it’s colder in the apartments. I would not say we’re in a rainbow mood.”

Further, he said, residents of this city of 5 million on the Neva River are smarting from sharp cuts in the defense industry that is so widespread here; they are worn down by fighting for their livelihood in the tough new economic climate. “So you can observe that people are sunk more deeply into their own affairs,” Belyayev said. “And, unfortunately, most of the people distracted by their personal affairs are those who support reforms.”

If the pro-reform democrats go down to defeat, the lukewarm backing they have received from natural supporters like the Kumkova-Selyayev family will be at least partially to blame.

In last April’s referendum, when Yeltsin asked voters whether they supported him, astronomer Irina Kumkova, 39, cast votes to support the president not only for herself but for her father-in-law, husband and sister. Now, she said: “Economic problems have reached their (low), to the point that people are completely indifferent. There’s so little faith that something can change that there’s no interest in all this.”

She supported Yeltsin’s reforms but planned to vote for Grigory Yavlinsky, the independent-minded economist.

Her husband, geophysicist Kiril Selyayev, 46, did not plan to vote, and his main reaction to the campaign was irritation. “Three or four years ago, I listened to all of it with pleasure,” he said, “but now I’m sick of it all. Politics is not controlled in our country and the people are all incompetent, so any vote now is pointless.”

Their daughter, Marina, an economics and finance student at St. Petersburg University, also had no plans to vote today. Neither did most of her friends, she said, noting: “I’m not interested in this at all. I think the political life is the sphere of the older generation. Young people don’t want to suffer for some ideas. They want to live their own lives.”

Such natural apathy mixes dangerously with the natural confusion that comes with a multi-issue election. In many districts, voters must deal with five ballots: three types on parliamentary races, one on the constitution and one on local elections.

Moreover, they face a panoply of unfamiliar faces. In St. Petersburg’s northern district, 20 candidates are running for one spot in Parliament. Unfortunately for the Yeltsin camp, most of the competitors are pro-reform, splitting the pro-reform vote and improving the chances of a Communist and a nationalist with no rivalry from their own allies.

Maxim Shabalin, a reporter for the daily Nevskoye Vremya, noted that the confusion was compounded by the limited space that newspapers were able to give to party lists and explanations in the month of the campaign. Even the lists that were published could be misleading, he said, because they gave professions simply as lawyer or journalist or political scientist for many candidates, who, as insiders knew, were really former high Communist officials.

Voters’ main resources became television and radio, and even enthusiastic political activists could find their vigor waning after prime-time programming night after night was replaced by endless candidates’ talking heads.

“People can’t give up work and read all the campaign literature,” accountant Urusov said. “And it’s hard. Before, it was just red or white, but now it’s such a spectrum that it’s a matter of taste what color is better.”

There was also a great degree of wishful thinking. Computerized modeling shows that “it is quite possible that the electorate will turn toward parties that offer authoritarian solutions to problems and create the illusion of transferring the burden of social problems from the voter to the government,” according to sociologist Betaneli.

In national terms, Russians’ eternal longing for an “iron hand” has translated largely into support for the populist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a spellbinding orator who captivated many voters with broadcasts offering a heady mix of politics, mangled history and sexual advice.

Zhirinovsky, who also used to spout anti-Semitic views and advocate reoccupying the Baltic states, garnered 8% in 1991 presidential elections and was expected to pull in even more votes this time around.

“He’s run an extremely effective campaign,” Shabalin said.

The pro-Yeltsin camp was working against a handicap as it tried to muster support: the bloodshed that resulted from Yeltsin’s decision in October to dissolve Parliament and lawmakers’ resistance to it. After that debacle, said engineer Vera Shenukhina, formerly a Yeltsin enthusiast, “I’d like to see new faces. It was a terrible event, and there were no winners and no losers, just a general blow. And it moved something in my soul, something was shaken.”