Voters Brave Snow, Cynicism to Mob Polls

Svetlana Pushkina, a 21-year-old medical student in Moscow, had an argument with her parents--”a big scandal,” she called it--on the eve of Russia’s parliamentary elections.

Pushkina told them she was determined to vote for the party led by Yegor T. Gaidar, a former economics minister and pioneer of Russia’s post-Soviet market reforms. “He is a symbol of changes for me.

“My parents wanted me to vote for the Communists,” she said. “They grew up back in the ‘60s, and they don’t like changes. They would rather go back to poverty for the sake of feeling secure.”

The argument was so heated, Pushkina said, that she and her parents came to their neighborhood polling station at different times Sunday even though they live under the same roof.

But the whole family did vote. And, like one huge, squabbling clan, so did other Russians in unexpectedly long lines across the country--64% of all registered voters, officials said.

The high turnout on a winter day, to choose a parliament with relatively little power, reversed a declining trend in post-Soviet elections here and confounded predictions that Russians are growing more cynical and apathetic about democracy.

More important, according to Russian politicians and foreign election observers, it sent a strong signal to Kremlin aides who have openly contemplated postponing the presidential election scheduled for June 16 so that Boris N. Yeltsin, the ailing and unpopular incumbent, can remain in office.

Voting was an obligatory civic rite in Soviet times, even though there was only one party on the ballot. In 1991, when Yeltsin became Russia’s first democratically elected leader, nearly 75% of the voters took part. The turnout dropped to 64% in an April 1993 referendum on Yeltsin’s performance in office and to 54% in parliamentary elections in December of that year.

As returns from Sunday’s vote trickled in from 11 time zones, it was unclear whether the larger turnout this time was more a protest vote adding to the front-running Communists’ tally or a flood of moderate ballots diluting their lead.

But officials and observers agreed it was a healthy trend. “It’s already a victory for the democratic process,” declared Nikolai T. Ryabov, chairman of Russia’s Central Election Commission, before the vote count had even begun.

Despite a snowstorm, Moscow polling stations were so jammed that voters didn’t bother to wait for the curtained voting booths to become vacant. They simply spread out into hallways to mark their ballots.

With more than 8,000 candidates from 43 parties competing for 450 seats in the Duma--the lower house of parliament--the ballots were daunting. One election official, Alexander I. Kushnaryov, called the ballots “ridiculously complicated” and predicted last week that many voters would “lose heart and throw them in the trash.”

Instead, the huge contest, played out mostly in the form of television advertisements and debates over the last four weeks, seemed only to whet voters’ passions.

Shouting matches among voters were common at meet-the-candidate sessions. Even children too young to vote got into the act, helping their parents understand the complex ballot and dragging them out to the polls.

“It fascinates me that, with 43 parties on such a complex ballot, the turnout was so good,” said Danny McDonald, chairman of the U.S. Federal Elections Commission, who is here as an observer. “If you look at our off-year elections [in the United States], it’s even more impressive. We turn out 35% to 40% in an off year.”

The election was closely watched as a crucial step in Russia’s troubled passage from 70 years of totalitarian Soviet rule, not only because of the Communist Party’s resurgent appeal but because of the country’s recent history of political violence.

Russians elected the current parliament just two months after Yeltsin’s tanks blasted the Communist leaders of the old one into bloodied submission after a year of political struggle over who was to rule the country. Voters at the time also adopted a Western-style constitution put forward by the president to enhance his powers.

“Had something gone wrong with this election,” said Michael Caputo, another observer from the United States, “the consequences could have been much worse than a big victory for the Communists.”

Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency quoted an official from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe as saying its 900 observers had registered no serious complaints about fraud in Sunday’s voting.

The 1993 race for parliament was tainted by such accusations. Many Russians who did not vote then said they decided to turn out this time to prevent unused ballots from being cast fraudulently.

Andrei Ostroukh of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.