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All Dressed Up and No One to Vote

St. Petersburg's Parliamentary Race Is Heated, Prominent and Met With Apathy

Chic and formidable in a black astrakhan fur jacket, Irina Khakamada surveyed the sad-eyed crowd at Nikolskoye Cemetery. They gathered there last month to mourn the city's best-known democratic politician, five years after she was gunned down -- as well as to mourn the decline of the democracy that Galina Starovoitova fought to build.

"Galina, we will remember you," Khakamada vowed as she addressed her flower-covered grave. "We will do what we can."

Khakamada, a striking businesswoman turned politician and one of Russia's most televised public personalities, is running to fill Starovoitova's long empty seat in the lower house of parliament, the State Duma. Her main opponent in the field of eight is Gennady Seleznyov, the equally well-known speaker of parliament who recently decamped from the Communists to found a socialist party.

On Sunday, voters in St. Petersburg and across Russia will go to the polls in the fourth national parliamentary elections since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Nowhere is there a race more competitive or more compelling as political theater than in Starovoitova's old district. It pits two of the country's best-known politicians against each other, with two starkly different views of what Russia should become.

But even here, in one of Russia's most democratically inclined cities, the campaign has showcased the failures of democracy as much as its successes. The parliamentary race faces vast indifference on the part of voters, some 60 percent of whom told Khakamada's pollsters they preferred no candidate at all. There has been a near-total absence of independent media coverage and there are complaints about the increasingly sophisticated use of large sums of money devoted to what Russian political operatives call "black PR technologies."

For Khakamada, 48, a top leader of the Union of Right Forces party, the campaign is all about taking on the mantle of the slain democrat she calls a close friend with whom she shared everything from ideology to fashion tips.

In the troubled annals of recent politics in Russia, Starovoitova is the closest thing to a martyr, her murder still unsolved, the Western-oriented reform party she helped found marginalized almost to the point of irrelevance. Currently a member of parliament from a neighboring district, Khakamada said she chose to run here in honor of her late friend.

"We are here together in her memory," Khakamada said. "Unfortunately, five years have passed and we are getting the impression that we have to start from scratch again." Russians, she said, "have fallen asleep."

Seleznyov, 56, is a professional pol who rose through the Communist ranks. He calls himself a native son in a district where he went to vocational school and worked in a metal processing factory. He describes Khakamada as a carpetbagger from Moscow who has run in four different districts in four parliamentary elections.

"You cannot make a political career using someone else's name," he said in an interview in Moscow, at the ornate speaker's office where he has spent much of the campaign tending to official business and leaving the hustings to others in his Russia's Rebirth party. "Khakamada is using black PR to exploit Galina Starovoitova."

In many ways, the recent history of the 209th district is one of disaffection with the democracy that Starovoitova embraced -- problems that the former Soviet dissident foresaw when she said "the way to freedom turned out to be far harder than we thought" not long before she was shot to death on her doorstep on Nov. 20, 1998.

After her killing, the seat representing the northern Vyborg and Kalinin regions of St. Petersburg was won by the reformist former prime minister Sergei Stepashin. But he resigned in 2000, and since then, two special elections have been held. Each time they were declared invalid because too few voters showed up to fulfill the 25 percent turnout requirement.

This time, too, both sides expect turnout to be low among the 470,000 eligible voters in the working-class district. In an unusual twist, more than 40,000 Russian citizens living in the United States will also have their votes counted in the 209th district. Under Russian rules, each country overseas with Russian voters is assigned to a particular district. Last time, however, just 4,000 votes were received from the United States, and few expect many more in this election.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29569-2003Dec2.html

03.12.2003 / Источник:Washington Post/

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