St. Petersburg Offers Russians a Political Preview

One campaigner was hospitalized after an unknown assailant threw acid in his face. Mayor Anatoly A. Sobchak claims that his opponents are bankrolled by organized crime. Yuri Boldyrev and other challengers accuse the incumbent of media manipulation, intimidating opponents and selling out St. Petersburg to rescue struggling Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin.

For a regional election that has been moved forward to next Sunday to let a reformist shoo-in set the mood for the June presidential vote, the St. Petersburg gubernatorial race is proving an ugly dress rehearsal.

Rather than blazing a democratic trail for the rest of Russia to follow, the contest here has acquired the same nasty political undertones polarizing the whole country.

A 58-year-old law professor who rose to rule this former imperial capital by defying Communist hard-liners during their failed 1991 coup, Sobchak has become an appropriate allegory for the fate of democracy in Russia. Bent on staying in power to prevent any erosion of his democratic achievements, he is employing tools and tactics of the one-party era and thereby compromising the very principles that earned him his reformist reputation.

“Sobchak has damaged his image as a democrat, but this is not an unexpected development in our country these days,” says Leonid Kesselman, a scholar with the Sociological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences here. “If Sobchak was conducting such a campaign in [the United States], he would probably be brought to trial. But in our country, it’s just the way things are done now.”

The St. Petersburg-based television channel, which remains state-run, has given intense coverage to the mayor’s campaign while limiting each opponent’s access to a 15-minute taped address to viewers.

Although there is no independent proof, Vladimir Yakovlev, a former Sobchak deputy who has broken with the incumbent to wage his own campaign, has accused Sobchak of being behind threatening anonymous phone calls he has been receiving.

Most blatant of the attempts to shackle his opponents was a residency requirement that Sobchak’s administration had inserted into the new election law. The requirement would have excluded his main challenger, Boldyrev, on a technicality.

The clause requires all gubernatorial candidates to have lived in St. Petersburg throughout the previous year; Boldyrev’s residence was in Moscow while he represented this region in the upper house of parliament, the Federation Council.

A lifelong St. Petersburg resident aside from his parliamentary service, Boldyrev earlier this month got a court order allowing him to run.

Sobchak, however, remains steadfast in his view that Boldyrev is ineligible and has taken a particularly aggressive stance against his most popular opponent.

“Anyone would be better than Boldyrev,” Sobchak insisted in an interview in his spacious office at Smolny Palace. “It would be a disaster if he were elected because he has no expertise in anything and has no experience running a city.”

Although he has named no names, Sobchak claims that his opponents are supported by organized crime and blamed the mysterious acid attack against Alexander Yuriev, his campaign manager, on organized crime figures trying to drive him from the race.

Sunday’s vote for the newly enhanced leadership of this city of 5 million is likely to need a runoff to determine a winner from among 20 contenders. But in the end, Sobchak is expected to easily retain the post that will change from mayor to governor with this election.

Opinion polls give Sobchak more than 33% support, with the nearest challenger--the equally reform-minded Boldyrev--drawing about 10%.

Unlike the federal presidential vote that has Yeltsin running neck-and-neck with Communist Party chief Gennady A. Zyuganov, the St. Petersburg contest is a battle among democrats, with the Communist and nationalist candidates thought to have virtually no chance.

By holding the St. Petersburg poll nearly a month ahead of the federal election, the forces for democracy are counting on an easy Sobchak win and a corresponding boost for the platform of political and economic reforms on which both Sobchak and Yeltsin are running.

“The entire country is closely watching the St. Petersburg election and considers it a dress rehearsal for the presidential vote,” Sobchak observes.

“Of all the democrats who initiated the fight to overthrow the Communist regime in favor of democracy, there are only two left: Yeltsin and Sobchak,” the incumbent insists. “My victory in this election will greatly increase Yeltsin’s chances in the presidential elections. That is why the election in St. Petersburg can be regarded as a kind of presidential primary.”

Confident of securing a second five-year term, Sobchak has spent much of his campaign time stumping for Yeltsin in the less predictable federal election.

That focus on the fate of the Kremlin has given Sobchak’s opponents ammunition to accuse him of ignoring local problems, such as St. Petersburg’s collapsing subway system, recurring flooding problems and a staggering shortage of housing.

“Our mayor insists that his victory will mean Yeltsin’s victory, and that his defeat would mean that all is lost everywhere,” Boldyrev says with obvious sarcasm.

Boldyrev declines to elaborate on why he believes that Sobchak has lost his democratic halo, but the challenger disputes the incumbent’s claims that only he can preserve the reform movement in St. Petersburg and that only Yeltsin can do it for Russia.

Former Polish President Lech Walesa “also warned that there would be disastrous consequences if he lost that election, and nothing really terrible has happened there,” Boldyrev says.

Independent analysts of St. Petersburg politics say there is nothing to fear in another term for the cerebral Sobchak, whose city has fared better than most Russian regions over the past five years and has begun to recover some of its pre-revolutionary glory.

Palaces are being restored, churches have been refurbished and returned to believers, and new shops and factories sprout daily on the horizon.

St. Petersburg leads the country in privatization and development of small business, and it has the lowest unemployment rate of any major Russian city, with less than 2%.

Indeed, those complaining about Sobchak’s campaign contend that they are mostly perplexed as to the front-runner’s motives.

“He doesn’t need to do this to win,” says Brian Whitmore, an American political scientist who has been teaching at Leningrad State University here for three years. “But that said, he’s been manipulating the media and intimidating other campaigns.

“What bothers me is that by doing these things, he hurts his reputation as a democrat and the cause of democracy as a whole, because reform and democracy are not bad words in St. Petersburg as they are in the rest of the country.”

Whitmore also criticizes Sobchak’s channeling of political energies to the campaign of Yeltsin, saying: “By attaching himself to an incredibly unpopular president whose reelection is in doubt, Sobchak can only hurt himself. There is a lot of speculation that some kind of deal was cut--we’ll let you have early elections if you support Yeltsin once you’ve won.”

The date of the St. Petersburg vote was a fiercely contested issue until March, when Yeltsin relented on Sobchak’s insistence that the gubernatorial vote be held on or before the presidential election.

That move mended fences between the federal and local democrats, but it has also left many in Russia’s second-largest city feeling that their affairs remain hostage to politicians in Moscow.

“Both elections are being presented to voters in terms that are too black and white,” complained Alexander Gorshkov, chief political writer for the local Nevskoye Vremya newspaper. “The tragedy of our intelligentsia is that they feel they have to support Sobchak and Yeltsin unquestioningly.”