Russian Voters Are Aligned by Age, Gender

It is a mystery of human behavior, a legacy of Soviet distortion and a parable for today’s cliffhanger presidential election that Olga Vladimirova and her father, Vasily, hold such contradictory memories of a life under one roof.

Olga’s recollections of childhood and young adult years spent under Communist power in a leafy suburb of this bustling capital are a catalog of silently endured indignities and dehumanization.

For Vasily, Soviet power was the inspiration for his generation’s valiant defeat of fascism and the transformation of a peasant society into a fearsome superpower.

Like millions of Russian families across this vast federation, the Vladimirovs are split by age and gender between two choices for Russia’s future that are as clashing as their memories of life in the Soviet Union.

Olga will vote for incumbent President Boris N. Yeltsin’s grandiose promise of a richer, freer and more ennobled future. Her father will cast his ballot for Communist Party challenger Gennady A. Zyuganov in a quest to rehabilitate a bittersweet and discredited past.

Voting has already begun in the more remote areas of this country that spans 11 time zones, as well as aboard ships at sea, among the absentee electorate and in the war-ravaged southern republic of Chechnya.

Security forces have been put on alert to guard against further acts of terrorism like last week’s deadly Moscow subway bombing, and nearly 1,100 foreign observers have fanned out across the country to deter voting fraud and intimidation.

The outcome of the first round may be known as early as late tonight, but it will be weeks or months before the rifts running through Russia’s polarized society start to disappear.

For Olga Vladimirova, 44, another era of Communist supremacy is too devastating to contemplate.

She remembers forgoing sleep for three nights to read a borrowed copy of the banned novel “Doctor Zhivago”--and the terror she felt for secretly endangering her family’s security with that renegade act.

She still resents the party’s economic ineptitude, which intruded into the most personal arenas, from the 15 years it took to get a separate apartment after she was married to the absence of contraceptives that left abortion the only option for birth control.

Every month, she recalls bitterly, she was crudely reminded of the system’s indifference.

“How could any woman who remembers the indignity of scrounging around the city and standing in endless lines for cotton wool even think about going back to life under the Communists?” she asks incredulously. “I didn’t even know what a tampon was before the democrats came to power.”

Reform, rough as it has been, has given her self-respect and confidence for the first time in her life, says Vladimirova, an unemployed real estate agent.

But for her 70-year-old father, a decorated war hero and once-venerated architect of secret military constructions, a victory by Zyuganov is a last chance for personal vindication.

An orphan of Stalinist repressions who spent a lifetime building the Potemkin village of a worker’s utopia, Vasily Vladimirov has watched upstart reformers and so-called democrats dismantle the system for which he struggled and sacrificed. Only Zyuganov’s triumph could exonerate a life spent in service of an ideology that has been defeated.

“The Soviet Union was destroyed by Yeltsin. It is as simple as that,” Vladimirov says venomously, seemingly unimpressed by the comfortable retirement his military pensions accord him. “If my children want to vote for him, that’s their business. But I fail to understand how he could win when he has only brought destruction.”

Political rifts run through families throughout Russia, largely because women shouldered the brunt of the social hardships that dominated life in the Soviet era and because the young and middle-aged have more easily adapted to the demands of capitalism than have the elderly.

With two-thirds of the electorate of working age and most opinion polls giving the edge to Yeltsin, one might conclude that the incumbent will prevail.

But Russian polls are notoriously unreliable, in part because people still fear those in power and hold back their true opinions.

The latest polls show Yeltsin ahead of Zyuganov by as much as 11 percentage points, but in a field of 10 candidates neither front-runner is expected to secure the 50% needed for victory in the first round. A runoff between the top two vote-getters is expected next month.

Yeltsin’s ambitious, four-month reelection campaign impressed even the most cynical observers and pulled his candidacy from hopelessness to the brink of success.

So confident is the incumbent that he told television viewers last week that he had forbidden his campaign team to make plans for a runoff.

“We will win in the first round,” the 65-year-old president declared, sending his aides scurrying to put out a less presumptuous spin.

None of the more prestigious polling institutes have forecast a first-round victory for Yeltsin, and many political analysts say the president has been swept up by his own momentum.

“Yeltsin works by intuition, and perhaps he thinks he can create a coattails effect,” says Michael McFaul, a Stanford University professor and Russian scholar.

But he believes that Yeltsin has peaked too early, allowing the potential kingmakers among the stronger also-rans to boost their support while the incumbent has become complacent.

Retired Gen. Alexander I. Lebed has suddenly risen in the standings with his law-and-order message, and ultranationalist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky has also been threatening to cash in on the considerable pool of undecided voters turned off by the top contenders.

Zyuganov may appear to be a colorless party functionary inexplicably hurled to the top of the Communist power pyramid, but charisma and media savvy hold little sway with Russian voters. That he failed to give rousing speeches or surge in the polls in the campaign’s home stretch may not augur his defeat.

Turnout among Russia’s 106 million eligible voters is expected to be high, as much as 85% if the cool and drizzly weather that prevailed Saturday continues to discourage more affluent voters from taking to the countryside for the weekend.

Even youthful Russians tend to regard voting as a patriotic obligation in this volatile election.

But the lure of a sunny day outside the grim towns and cities in which three-quarters of the population lives, coupled with a major televised European Cup soccer game between Russia and Germany tonight, could cut into the turnout.

* VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE: Russian emigres show indifference to homeland’s election. B1