I have been wary of making political forecasts since the embarrassment of The Moscow Times' sweepstakes in the 1993 elections. The political desk, including myself, were lulled by the conventional wisdom that Yegor Gaidar's Russia's Choice would win 25 percent or more of the vote. Two perceptive Russians, neither of them journalists -- one of them the receptionist, the other the assistant photo editor -- had the right feeling about Vladimir Zhirinovsky and one of them won a large stack of rubles.


Still, at the risk of getting burned a second time, I venture to predict that the opposite surprise may be in store this time and the Duma elected Sunday will not be as red-brown as the soothsayers are painting it. This is not because the electorate has suddenly started to love the government but because of the cruel tricks the 5-percent threshold rule may play on the dozen or so blocs from the nationalist opposition.


Much has been written about the "failure of the democrats" to unite. In fact a recent study by the pollster Igor Klyamkin suggests why they did not. Grigory Yavlinsky draws an immense amount of his support from those who like the idea of reform, but are hostile to Gaidar and his reforms of 1992. I can confirm this from watching Yavlinsky in Nizhny Novgorod last week where an audience of factory workers gave him a polite, generally positive hearing, something that would have been unthinkable for Gaidar.


According to Klyamkin's data, a Yavlinsky-Gaidar alliance would have cost Yavlinsky 43 percent of his supporters and Gaidar 24 percent of his.


They would actually have lost votes by running together, not gained them. The real splitters are Boris Fyodorov and Ella Pamfilova, who may achieve nothing in this election except pulling Gaidar below the 5-percent threshold, the political equivalent of one drowning man dragging down another.


Nonetheless, with a good show by Yavlinsky, the reformist wing of Our Home Is Russia and a couple of dozen big-name democrats in the local seats, the demokraty will still have a substantial presence in the Duma.


But now pity the nationalists. According to Leonid Sedov of the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion polling institution, or VTsIOM, if the turnout is very high the vote will start to fission. A lot of the late voters could then opt for the "vanity parties" of people like Boris Gromov, Stanislav Govorukhin, Alexander Rutskoi, Nikolai Ryzhkov and Vladimir Polevanov. The result will only be to hurt Alexander Lebed and Yury Skokov's Congress of Russian Communities and Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Sedov cited one poll in which neither Lebed and Skokov nor Zhirinovsky cleared the 5-percent barrier. The big winners in a high turnout appear to be the Women of Russia, who could even come second to the Communists.


Not many thousand votes could suddenly make a lot of difference in this arithmetical conundrum. If Sedov is right, a slightly lower turnout or a late improvement could help any of a half dozen parties over the threshold and immediately award them as many as 20 seats. Gaidar and Zhirinovsky should be praying for an all-Russian flu epidemic to keep the late voters at home.


Then there is the "swamp," the vast mass of independents, bureaucrats, businessmen, mafiosi and so on who will form the majority of the 225 single-seat constituencies. Our Home Is Russia should do well in these seats, especially in areas where the local administration -- and hence the local media -- is backing the government party. It would be rash to tempt the treacherous arithmetic of this election, but it is quite conceivable that the combined centrist-government mass (including the Women of Russia) at the heart of the new parliament could have as many as half of the 450 seats. The Communists could end up with 100 seats and no real influence. Lebed and Skokov could gaze across a Duma chamber almost completely devoid of soul mates. Just as in the current Duma, the government would have the leverage to buy off regional deputies and get through the budget, and block any threatening legislation.


Another interesting prospect is that if the Women of Russia indeed do very well, they will be the natural candidates to put up a new speaker, the Duma's equivalent of the British House of Commons' Betty Boothroyd. That would certainly alter the style, if not the substance, of Russian politics.