ST. PETERSBURG -- Among the candidates vying for a seat in the State Duma is the man who tried to kill then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 in the name of democracy.
He hopes the voters won't hold that against him.
"I know people have a negative attitude toward terrorists today, but I have a very strong program," Alexander Shmonov said in an interview this week.
Shmonov, who wears a gray suit one size too small and combs his hair across his balding scalp, refused to discuss the details of his election platform because he feared he would be accused of campaigning before he is officially registered as a candidate.
But he has not lost any of his political convictions in the years since the assassination attempt - five of which were spent in a mental institution. And the campaign literature that he has already printed reveals an odd brand of utopianism.
He proposes price controls to create a more egalitarian society and 24-hour surveillance for bureaucrats to combat corruption.
But his most novel proposal is for every citizen to be granted the right to declare independence on his own 11-hectare plot of land, provided free by the government. These mini-states could then be bought and sold. This way, like-minded people could buy a certain amount of land close to each other and form a truly democratic state.
For now, however, Shmonov has a much more banal goal: to make it through the election commission's registration. On Sunday, he submitted the required 5,000 signatures to the 206th district's election commission in St. Petersburg. The commission said it will determine whether the signatures are authentic by Nov. 2.
But if he is registered as a candidate, Shmonov is in for a serious fight. Among the 21 candidates who hope to run in the 206th district are Sergei Tsyplyayev, President Boris Yeltsin's official representative in St. Petersburg, and controversial television journalist and Duma Deputy Alexander Nevzorov.
Shmonov, whose Party of Establishing All Prices and Wages Within Private Businessby the State claims 50 members, said he believes he has a 5 percent to 10 percent chance of winning.
"It does not matter much if I win or not," Shmonov said, his hands folded neatly on the table. "I am running primarily for the sake of letting the people know about my party's program. I am running for the sake of the people."
Likewise, it was for the people's sake, he said, that he fired a rifle at Gorbachev on Nov. 7, 1990, in the middle of a Revolution Day parade on Red Square.
"I wanted to kill Gorbachev - or rather, I wanted to take revenge," Shmonov, 47, calmly recounted this week.
Shmonov was angry that Gorbachev sent troops to deal with independence demonstrators in Tbilisi, Georgia, in April 1989, and in Baku, Azerbaijan, in January 1990. He also accuses Gorbachev of a "seizure of power without the people's consent," as he believes Gorbachev was never legally elected to his post.
And, as Shmonov proclaims in his self-published memoirs, titled "How and Why I Shot at the Boss of a Totalitarian State: M. Gorbachev," the Soviet leader "harassed and tortured the people of the U.S.S.R."
So in 1988, Shmonov, then a metal worker at the Izhorsky factory near St. Petersburg, told his wife he wanted to become a hunter.
"I told her that I decided to hunt so that we could occasionally have rabbit soup," Shmonov said. "Of course I couldn't have told her that I wanted to kill Gorbachev, or else she would have reported me to the KGB."
It took Shmonov two years to become a member of a local hunters' organization, after which he received a license to own a gun. The papers he needed to submit to the police included a report from a mental clinic, which stated he was perfectly sane.
Shmonov never used that gun to kill an animal, he said. Instead, he cut off the end of the rifle, loaded it with two bullets and went to Moscow. He joined the holiday procession on Red Square, and when he was 47 meters from Gorbachev - who was standing on the Lenin Mausoleum, the traditional position of the Soviet elite during parades - he pulled out the gun and aimed.
"I was already pulling the trigger when a sergeant grabbed the rifle, and I fired in the air," Shmonov said regretfully. But he said he has no plans to kill Gorbachev or any other government official today because "we are a democratic state now, and I don't want to violate the laws of a democracy."
Shmonov was immediately arrested and shortly thereafter found to be mentally ill. While he was confined to a St. Petersburg mental hospital, his wife divorced him. Today he is a plumber and rents a single room in a communal apartment.
Shmonov said he probably would have been executed if not for the diagnosis of mental illness.
"But it is worse for the people," he said. "Because if a crazy person shot at the president, then it can be attributed to his insanity. But if the assassin was [found] healthy, then the people would have understood that he was taking revenge for the president's evil deeds."