Fickle Russians Make Outcome of Upcoming Elections a Guessing Game

Every workday for the last eight years, Tatyana Yevstafyevna has set up shop on the same patch of sidewalk, tacking newspapers to a plywood stand and selling them to passersby. Between customers, she reads her wares: dailies, tabloids, TV guides. But so far, she said, they haven’t helped her choose whom to vote for Sunday.

“I haven’t decided yet,” the stout 60-year-old sheepishly said last week. “I’ll probably make up my mind in the voting booth.”

If so, she won’t be alone. In many polls, the leading contender in Russia’s parliamentary elections is “undecided.” And that means the outcome--which will set the stage for presidential elections in six months--is likely to depend as much on voters’ moods as on their convictions.

“There is a huge variation of opinion, and about 20% of voters will change their minds at the last minute,” said Dmitri Kozenko, editor in chief of the daily newspaper Saratov.

The vote is unpredictable not because Russians lack information or opinions; Tatyana Yevstafyevna hands out big doses of both with her newspapers and crossword puzzles. The problem is that in Russia’s primitive democracy, political beliefs still don’t translate directly into voting behavior.

“We still haven’t found a way for the people to communicate with those in power,” said Anatoly Rodionov, a candidate from the liberal Yabloko party. “Our people aren’t mature. Our parties aren’t mature. Our democracy isn’t yet mature.”

After only eight years of nominal democracy, parties in Russia still tend to be fluid groupings of political elites brought together less by ideology than by the magnetism of one or two central personalities. Two of the three parties topping national polls were founded within the last five months.

As a result, voters here in Saratov are focused not on the local campaigns but on the national power struggle between pro- and anti-Kremlin personalities and alliances. And while the local candidates are trying hard to get their attention by visiting factories, passing out fliers and buying local TV time, the efforts don’t seem to be making much of an impact.

“Maybe when I get into the voting booth I’ll see a familiar name,” said Galina Kosovnina, a 50-year-old plumbing supplies salesclerk. “May I’ll just cross them all out.”

Russia’s parliamentary elections are unusual in that voters will fill out two ballots. The first elects a candidate to be the district’s representative in parliament; half the seats in the 450-member State Duma, or lower house, are from these “single-mandate” districts. The remaining half are allocated proportionally to parties that receive more than 5% of the total on the second ballot, in which voters express a preference for one of 26 nationally registered political parties.

The Communists remain Russia’s most established party with the strongest grass-roots network, but they no longer dominate the country’s political debate. They can count on the support of about 20% of the population, mostly the elderly and disenchanted.

The rest of the electorate is volatile, often contradictory in its thinking and largely up for grabs.

Many single-mandate candidates, aware of voters’ dislike for parties, are deliberately unaffiliated. Here in Saratov, a formerly closed military industrial city 450 miles southeast of Moscow, half of the 14 candidates in the city district are listed as independents, including two of the top contenders.

As in the West, voters’ top concern is the economy. Saratov, once the capital of the Soviet Union’s electronics industry, has weathered the financial crises a bit better than most. Regional officials estimate that local factories are working at only about one-third their former level, but consumer manufacturing and services have made up some of the difference. Officials claim that the unemployment rate is below 2%.

Nonetheless, disenchantment remains high.

“I lived well under the Communists. I didn’t have a car, but I didn’t lack money,” said 44-year-old Vladimir Roshkov, who lost his job at a glass factory and works for a glassware distributor. He gets paid regularly and at higher wages, but he misses the stability of the old days. He said he’ll vote for the Communists on Sunday.

“Now every time you go to the hospital you have to pay,” he said. “Every time you go anywhere you have to pay. We work and have nothing to show for it. It was better the way we used to work before.”

Tatyana Yevstafyevna--who gave her first and middle names, but asked that her surname not be used--hasn’t had an easy life since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. A former gymnastics coach with a college education, she is not happy making her living by standing on the street all day. She said local officials are hard on small-business people, demanding high license fees and sales taxes.

She heaped scorn on President Boris N. Yeltsin and his coterie of advisors once hailed as “reformers” but doesn’t think the Communists are the answer.

“I supported perestroika. I wanted a market economy,” she said. “But they didn’t build a market economy. All they did was deceive everybody.”

She still supports market reform but won’t vote on the basis of what Americans would call “issues.” She’s looking for a leader and believes that her choice boils down to Grigory A. Yavlinsky, head of the Yabloko party, or Yevgeny M. Primakov, a former prime minister fired by Yeltsin in May.

Westerners might consider the two politicians miles apart ideologically: Yavlinsky is an avid support of free markets, while Primakov favors increasing state intervention in the economy. But Tatyana Yevstafyevna doesn’t care.

“When Primakov talks, I can feel how decent he is, how intelligent,” she said. “If only he were younger.”

Primakov, 70, founded an election bloc last summer with Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov called Fatherland-All Russia. It climbed so quickly in the polls that the Kremlin formed a countermovement: Unity, headed by a can-do Cabinet member, Emergencies Minister Sergei K. Shoigu.

Both Fatherland-All Russia and Unity have adopted the label “centrist” to distance themselves from discredited Communist ideas and unpopular reformist policies.

Unity has quickly overtaken Fatherland-All Russia in popularity polls, prompting Primakov to try to pump up his bloc’s flagging ratings Friday by formally announcing his bid for the presidency next year.

The latest poll from the independent All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion put support for Unity at 21% compared with the Communists’ 24%, within a margin of error of 4 percentage points. Fatherland-All Russia was a distant third, with support from 12% of voters, followed by the two liberal groups--Yabloko with 8% and the pro-Kremlin Union of Right Forces with 7%.

But in part because Russian voters change their minds quickly, polls here tend to be unreliable election predictors.

Voters say a major influence in the campaign’s final days is likely to be television. Saratov’s airwaves are awash with paid and unpaid political advertising. The parties and candidates are nearly indistinguishable, using many of the same slogans: Honesty, Reliability, Good Jobs. The campaign has been marked by smear tactics on state-controlled TV against Primakov and Luzhkov that have deflated their ratings even though viewers recognize the ads as manipulative.

“They watch with half-open eyes, listen with half-open ears,” said Rodionov, the Yabloko candidate. “The message manages to get through.”

The nastiness of the TV wars has increased fears that some forces might try to manipulate or disqualify the ballot, at least in local races.

Saratov’s governor, Dmitri F. Ayatskov, is trying to keep above the fray. One reason is that he is a leader of Our Home Is Russia, a party formed to support Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection bid. The party now is near the bottom of the polls. Ayatskov said he hopes his bloc and Unity can join to form a new ruling party, what Russians call a “party of power.”

Leonty Byzov, a research fellow at the Russian Independent Institute on Social and National Problems, said the emergence of the “center” is not necessarily good news for the West. Voters who support the centrists--about 70%--hold views that Westerners might find disturbing. Those include increasing the state role in the economy, reimposing order even by “firm” methods and putting Russia on a course of development that does not rely on the West.

“It is now the West that is beginning to be viewed as the quintessence of evil, evoking various fears and threats for a considerable segment of the population,” he said.

Voters also express deep cynicism about the democratic process, complaining that all politicians are crooked and all regimes the same. But they turn out for elections in higher numbers than their Western counterparts.

If nothing else, that gives democracy advocates cause for hope. Russian democracy may be rudimentary, but at least voters haven’t given up on it yet.

“Honestly, I think very little will change because of these elections,” said Natalya Konetsskaya, a 23-year-old accountant for a department store here. “It’s a big disgrace for our country that people have nothing to believe in. But as long as I have the right to vote, I have a responsibility to use it.”