Russians Vote in High-Stakes Parliament Race

Against a backdrop of war, corruption and financial uncertainty, voters across Russia today will elect a new Duma, the house of parliament that has served as the focal point for Communist opposition to President Boris N. Yeltsin.

An estimated 64 million voters will choose from 26 party slates vying for seats in parliament’s lower chamber. Candidates range from the grandson of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to a man accused of murder who is campaigning from his jail cell to the politician who last year presided over the nation’s financial collapse.

Most important, Russia’s first nationwide vote in nearly four years is serving as an unofficial primary election in the selection of a successor to Yeltsin, whose second term will end next summer.

With such high stakes, the brief Duma campaign has been hard-fought and often dirty, with Russia’s powerful oligarchs allegedly spending vast sums to maintain their influence in the Kremlin and crush political foes. Pro-Kremlin candidates have seen their popularity lifted by a rising tide of nationalism as Russia has waged war in Chechnya over the last 11 weeks.

For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the national election battle is no longer between Communists and their opponents. The Communist Party, headed by Gennady A. Zyuganov, is certain to win the votes of its die-hard supporters, roughly 20% of the electorate, and will probably remain the largest faction in the Duma. But it has little chance of making gains among other voters and returning to power through the ballot box.

For the most part, the Communists have watched from the sidelines during the campaign as the Kremlin battled its key rivals, former Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov and Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov, who in August formed the Fatherland-All Russia bloc.

Since Yeltsin fired Primakov in May, the Kremlin and the oligarchs who support it have targeted the 70-year-old former spy chief as their biggest political threat and used the Duma campaign to cripple him and Luzhkov. The oligarchs--wealthy businesspeople, many of whom have prospered under the corrupt privatization program of the Yeltsin era--fear that they could lose everything if Primakov became president.

“Today there is a deep split in the party of power,” said Communist Party spokesman Anton V. Vasilchenko. The Primakov-Luzhkov bloc and the Kremlin “are locked in a very nasty and merciless fight. They are so busy pouring streams of dirt on each other that they have forgotten not only about us but about the voters in general.”

The Kremlin’s inner circle--popularly known as The Family--has run a masterful campaign, using the television stations and newspapers it controls to bludgeon its opponents.

The first move in the Kremlin effort came in August, when Yeltsin fired Prime Minister Sergei V. Stepashin and replaced him with Vladimir V. Putin, chief of the security services. In an unusual move, the ailing Yeltsin publicly designated Putin as his successor.

In the weeks that followed, Kremlin backers formed the Unity movement virtually out of thin air to run for the Duma. It is headed by Yeltsin’s longest-term Cabinet member, Emergencies Minister Sergei K. Shoigu, who until this campaign had remained aloof from politics.

In early October, Russia sent troops into separatist Chechnya, a move so popular with the public that only one major political faction, the pro-market Yabloko party, has dared to speak against it. Putin and Unity soared to the top of the polls, and he supplanted Primakov as Russia’s most popular politician.

Primakov, who announced Friday that he will run for president next year, has watched his bloc’s share of support in the polls plummet from more than 30% in the summer to as little as 12% last week.

“The Kremlin wanted to use this election to inflict the most possible damage on the men The Family sees as its main adversaries: Primakov and Luzhkov,” said Andrei A. Piontkovsky, director of the Moscow-based Independent Institute for Strategic Studies. “The task has been very crudely but extremely successfully fulfilled.”

Billionaire Boris A. Berezovsky, often considered the most influential of the oligarchs, boasted to the newspaper Novaya Gazeta last week that he had masterminded the strategy of installing Putin as presidential successor and creating Unity.

“I am happy that I persuaded not only my close circle but also the society to believe that the new construction [Putin as premier] was feasible,” said the tycoon, who is expected to win his own seat in the Duma today.

Vyacheslav A. Nikonov, a Luzhkov advisor who has spent time in the U.S., said the Kremlin has succeeded against the Fatherland-All Russia bloc with a campaign so dirty that it makes Richard Nixon’s election bids look clean by comparison.

Nikonov charged that the Kremlin has used the government’s vast resources and political power to secure the loyalty of governors, generals and other key political figures. When one governor agreed to support the Unity bloc, he promptly received millions of dollars in subsidies that had long been delayed, Nikonov charged.

Fatherland-All Russia also has alleged that Kremlin backers tried to bribe some of its candidates to quit the race, offering them from $100,000 to $1 million. If 25% of the candidates had dropped out, the entire slate would have been disqualified. In the end, four accepted the money and quit, Nikonov said. Twenty more filed a complaint with Russia’s prosecutor general. The Kremlin denies the charge.

The Kremlin has also effectively used its control over the media. In programs presented as news shows, pro-Kremlin broadcasters have hammered Primakov and Luzhkov with a variety of serious but unproved allegations, from corruption to murder.

When Primakov bought television time for a 30-second commercial showing him delivering a short statement, his foes made similar ads featuring two fringe candidates sitting at similar desks and reading nearly identical statements while the same music played in the background. Then two networks controlled by Kremlin backers ran the three spots together, with the Primakov ad sandwiched in between to dilute its effect.

“Watergate was nothing compared to these guys,” Nikonov said. “They control 90% of the media and have hundreds of times more money than all the other campaigns put together. Instead of fighting the Communists, we are fighting the Kremlin.”

Under the 1993 constitution pushed through by Yeltsin, half of the Duma’s 450 seats will be given to candidates running in districts and half will be allocated proportionally to party slates that receive more than 5% of the vote. Polls indicate that at least four parties will surpass the 5% barrier: the Communists, Unity, Fatherland-All Russia and the pro-market Yabloko.

Two other factions have a chance of winning more than 5%: the Union of Right Forces, headed by former Prime Minister Sergei V. Kiriyenko, who presided over Russia’s 1998 fiscal collapse; and the Zhirinovsky Bloc, headed by the flamboyant ultranationalist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky. Although they espouse wildly different philosophies, both blocs are Kremlin backers and will help give Yeltsin a substantial share of votes in the Duma.

Of the more than 6,000 candidates running for the Duma, about 2,300 are running in individual districts--most of them as candidates without party affiliation. One Duma seat will remain empty because there will be no vote held in Chechnya.

One notable candidate running in a St. Petersburg district is Yuri Shutov, who has been jailed since February on charges of participating in the murders of at least four businessmen and government officials. He is also accused of attempted murder, assault, arson, theft and being the leader of an organized crime group. If he wins a seat in the Duma, he will be guaranteed immunity from prosecution, as is every deputy.

The 26 party slates on the ballot demonstrate the competition among political factions and figures seeking a place in Russian public life. They range from Russia’s Women, a pro-Kremlin group, to the Stalinist Bloc for the USSR, which is spearheaded by retired army Gen. Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, Stalin’s grandson.

A chip off the old block, Dzhugashvili recently charged that Zionists were “ravaging Russia” and said he would have killed people who insulted the memory of his grandfather “if I’d had a gun.”

While Dzhugashvili has little chance of getting into the Duma, the Communist Party, with its more mainstream appeal, could win more than a quarter of the seats, said Unity spokesman Yevgeny I. Zuyenko. Even so, Russia has changed so much in the last eight years, he said, that the aging party will never regain the power it once had.

“They have ceased to be a real menace,” Zuyenko said. “Nobody is afraid of them anymore. They have been pushed to the side of the main road, and they will stay there even if they get 30% in the new Duma. They will never be able to form a controlling majority in the house, and they will never be able to form their own government.”