Vote Fever Grips the Kremlin, Already

Spring is in the air and as the ice begins to crack on Siberian rivers, political Moscow has begun frantically realigning for nine months of battle before first parliamentary and then presidential elections.


Election laws have finally made it onto parliament's agenda; old alliances have been broken and new factions formed; and in the dark undercurrent that invariably flows beneath the surface of Moscow politics, allegations of foul play have already begun to fly.


The single defining element in the current spate of realignments has been the Chechen war. Because of the conflict, President Boris Yeltsin has now conclusively broken with his former prime minister Yegor Gaidar and the team that symbolized his reforming phase of 1991 and 1992.


In the wake of the war, the president's electoral prospects now look fairly grim. Opinion polls show popular support for Yeltsin to be at a low ebb, while the political machinery of Democratic Russia -- however imperfect -- is now lost to him.


The good news for the battered president is that no single figure has emerged who seems likely to do much better than him. But more than a year remains until the scheduled election day and the president's aides are moving.


To replace his lost grass-roots support, Yeltsin is trying to build a new base at the center of Russian politics. In the last month his aides have been actively building a new Social Democratic Party, under the leadership of the veteran ideologist of perestroika, Alexander Yakovlev, and a new cross-party group in the State Duma called Stability.


Both groups are likely to run in the parliamentary elections, which are widely seen as a rehearsal for the presidential polls in June 1996.


Stability's short-term leader Alexei Leushkin told The Moscow Times -- in between making calls on his mobile telephone to try and recruit new members -- that Stability was "a democratically oriented faction of stateists."


But what its members mainly have in common is allegiance to the president. Most of Stability's deputies are virtual unknowns, drawn from across the political spectrum. An analysis in Tuesday's edition of Segodnya showed that they have low attendance rates in the Duma and no obvious voting patterns.


The group is being promised lavish financial support. Leading businessman and deputy Oleg Boiko, formerly a close ally of Gaidar's, told Commersant Daily that the group had been formed by a "pool of seven or eight large banks, whose political interests naturally coincide."


Centrist deputy Vyacheslav Nikonov, who has not joined the group, called it a clumsy alliance of state and business.


"You have got here not only the nomenklatura, but the interests of a whole range of Russian financial structures, which consider it essential to support the faction in the State Duma, which supports the president," Nikonov said.


Hitherto, Yeltsin has always shied away from forming his own "presidential party," although the idea has been floated several times -- above all by Gaidar's Russia's Choice in October 1993. But with the advent of Stability, it seems that the president feels he does now need his own party.


The second string to the president's bow is Alexander Yakovlev's Social Democratic Party.


Yakovlev's party has been formed as social democratic parties have been taking power across Eastern Europe, but it is unlike the ones that have won elections in Hungary, Poland and Lithuania recently, because it is not a grass-roots movement.


Yakovlev, once the guiding spirit of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, is now a loyal Yeltsin supporter. Yeltsin's chief of staff Sergei Filatov attended the new party's founding congress last month and read out a formal message of support from the president.


Sergei Markov, political analyst with the Carnegie Foundation in Moscow, said Yeltsin's team was buying itself the maximum leverage on the coming elections, which could very likely go against them.


Yaklovev's party, he said, should be seen as part of an attempt to solve "the problem of the formation of a loyal opposition," someone to whom power could be handed with an easy heart. If the extreme opposition looked poised to take power, he said, they would consider cancelling the polls altogether.


Also in this latter, more sinister, vein has been the campaign against Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, driven by the president's closest aide, General Alexander Korzhakov. Over the last four months Korzhakov and the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta have accused Luzhkov, one of Russia's most powerful politicians after Yeltsin, of corruption. The campaign has been widely interpreted as an attempt to undermine a possible presidential threat.


The restructuring of the state television company Ostankino has also alarmed journalists and legislators. At parliamentary hearings Tuesday many speakers said the new privatized state television company could be a powerful political weapon in the hands of the president in the run up to elections, and pledged to block changes at the station.


Meanwhile, Yeltsin has started to go out and appeal to the voters directly in a more acceptable electoral tactic. Next week he is due to tour a series of southern Russian towns on a vigorously active spring vacation. The campaign, it seems, has begun.