Celebs Play Coy With Party Vote

So, you want to know how Alla Pugachyova voted? Well, she and a lot of other national luminaries were a little mysterious about how they cast their ballots Sunday.


But a little old-fashioned Kremlinology goes a long way in figuring out who liked whom in the ballot box.


Take Mayor Yury Luzhkov. An official from his press office, who did not identify herself, said she could not reveal whom the mayor voted for Sunday.


"It's a secret," she said. But Luzhkov himself told Interfax he was pleased with Moscow's voting record, where Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin's Our Home Is Russia bloc had a firm lead.


"I am glad that Muscovites have reaffirmed their adherence to democracy and reforms," he said. Luzhkov took pains to point out that Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party of Russia would likely not get more than 5 percent of the vote in Moscow.


There must be something about the way mayors vote. A spokeswoman in St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak's office said he voted for Our Home Is Russia, but said she was not sure of his reasons.


President Boris Yeltsin's wife, Naina, on the other hand, failed to show her hand and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev would only allow that he voted for the "centrists."


Alexander Korzhakov, presidential bodyguard and chief of Kremlin security, announced that he would be voting for Duma speaker Ivan Rybkin while his wife favored Chernomyrdin.


Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the the nobel prize winning author, spared no venom in announcing that he refused to vote. He told NTV television that the elections were "unequal and unjust" and that he would sit out this one.


"If you are a member of a party, then you don't have to fight for votes, you get elected by a list," he said. "Is that equality?"


Solzhenitsyn also condemned what he called a "deal" between the legislative and executive branches under which people currently in power get to run for a seat in parliament.


When it comes to the Pugachyovas, the family that sings together votes together.


"The whole family has made up its mind -- Chernomyrdin, Gaidar, Yavlinsky and [Svyatoslav] Fyodorov. Who else? No one else," megastar Pugachyova told television, not providing specifics.