The assault on Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now in prison while awaiting trial on charges of fraud and tax evasion, is believed to have been inspired in part by his funding of opposition parties and attempts to install a loyal faction in the Duma.
Companies held by other, more Kremlin-friendly oligarchs, however, also have their people on the Communist list.
Alfa Group, which has interests in both the oil and the banking sectors, has at least three candidates on the party list, and Vladimir Potanin's Interros holding has at least one.
The top Yukos candidate is Alexei Kondaurov, an official aide to the president of Yukos-Moskva who has an annual income of $629,556. He is running in the 13th spot on the party's federal list.
"I want to live in a country where political opposition works," Kondaurov, a former FSB general, said in an interview.
"This is why I'm running with the Communists."
He said he is running on the Communist ticket on his own initiative, but a party official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the oil company paid for Kondaurov's spot.
Kondaurov is followed on the party's federal list by Sergei Muravlenko, a major Yukos shareholder who was chairman of the board until last summer. He declared an annual income of more than $11 million.
According to the party official, Yukos also paid for the No. 15 spot on the federal list for Yuly Kvitsinsky, a former deputy foreign minister who is now Russia's ambassador to Norway.
Yukos also put forward Alexander Nagorny, the deputy editor of the Zavtra newspaper and a colleague of Kondaurov's from the FSB, and Alexander Ugarov, an adviser to the Duma budget committee, the Communist official said.
Although Nagorny is running in the seventh spot on the South Black Earth regional list and Ugarov in the fourth spot on the North Black Earth list, both have a good chance of getting through.
The North Black Earth group includes the Lipetsk, Tambov, Ryazan and Penza regions, and the South Black Earth group incudes the Belgorod, Voronezh and Kursk regions, all of which are part of the so-called red belt, which in the last elections gave the Communists from 25 percent to 35 percent of the vote.
The Communist Party has a federal list with 18 candidates and 20 regional lists. Each party determines the number and regional distribution of its lists of candidates.
Alfa Group's candidates are led by Alfa Bank board chairman Igor Annensky, an old Communist Party sponsor, who is running in the No. 3 spot on the West list. Annensky declared an annual income of more than $2 million.
Boris Khramovskikh, in the No. 3 spot on the West Siberian list, is a former adviser to the president of Tyumen Oil Co., or TNK, whose major shareholders include Alfa Group.
TNK board member Boris Strekalov is also running as a Communist, in the No. 4 spot on the party's Southwest list.
The two other oil company representatives are Viktor Kononov, deputy head of human resources at Surgutneftegaz, the fourth-largest oil company; and Vakha Agayev, chairman of the board of Yugneftprodukt. Kononov is running in the No. 8 spot on the West Siberia list and Agayev in the third spot on the Caucasus list.
Interros has at least one candidate on the Communist list: its vice president Sergei Batchikov, who is running in the fourth spot on the Starorussky list. He sponsored left-leaning economist Sergei Glazyev's run for governor of the Krasnodar region last year.
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