Powerful Groups Duel in Key Siberia Vote

MOSCOW — The pollsters are mobilized. Television air time is at a premium. Spin doctors are bending ears, and campaign war chests are bulging.

If the electoral battle reaching a crescendo in faraway Krasnoyarsk sounds like the New Hampshire primary, that might be because it has become the dress rehearsal for Russia’s next presidential election in 2000.

Because of its outsize importance, the May 17 runoff for governor in the Siberian region--pitting Kremlin-allied incumbent Valery Zubov against nationalist and former Gen. Alexander I. Lebed--is giving rise to the most expedient of alliances. And it is raising the question of whether the “party of power” led by President Boris N. Yeltsin still has the strength to pull off an upset victory in little more than two weeks.

Yeltsin struggled back from single-digit approval ratings to win reelection two years ago, but the rich bankers and industrialists who financed that comeback are divided in their loyalties to the dueling duo in Krasnoyarsk.

“What is important in this case is that the most powerful financial-industrial groups in the country have locked horns for the first time in the electoral struggle,” Vladimir Todres of the independent Russky Telegraf newspaper notes.

Much of the funding for Lebed’s media blitzkrieg on the eve of his first-place finish Sunday in the initial round of voting was reported by Russian media of various political persuasions to have come from billionaire Boris A. Berezovsky, the oil, transport and media magnate with a penchant for playing kingmaker and a grudge against rival oligarch Vladimir O. Potanin of the Uneximbank financial empire.

Uneximbank owns a controlling interest in the Norilsk nickel works in northern Krasnoyarsk--one of the spoils of privatization captured by Potanin, to Berezovsky’s vocal dismay.

Lebed finished a surprisingly strong first Sunday, with 45% of the vote against Zubov’s 35%.

Communist contender Pyotr Romanov was third in a field of eight candidates, winning 13%. But Romanov’s supporters may prove of no help to either contender in the runoff.

Russia’s Communist Party leader, Gennady A. Zyuganov, has urged those who voted for Romanov to boycott the runoff and deprive both candidates of their votes.

The Communist constituency, made up of elderly pensioners and impoverished rural residents, would probably gravitate toward Lebed, whose military background and bellowed threats against corruption carry weight with those left in the dust of Russia’s economic transition.

But Zyuganov still sees himself as a contender for the presidency in 2000, and his most menacing challenger would be a law-and-order candidate like Lebed.

“In the present circumstances, I think Lebed is the greatest threat to the whole of Russia, not just the [Krasnoyarsk] territory,” Zyuganov told journalists here Thursday.

He also lambasted Sunday’s vote as the dirtiest that he had witnessed in a long time.

Zyuganov’s own political fortunes have been waning since his July 1996 defeat by Yeltsin in the presidential runoff, meaning that Lebed is now the chief threat to anyone with presidential intentions.

Still, although the Communists want Lebed removed from the political scene before the next presidential election, Zyuganov can hardly urge his party to back Zubov--a reform advocate handpicked by Yeltsin who epitomizes the brutal capitalism that the Communists blame for Russia’s woes.

Among those harboring ambitions to succeed Yeltsin is Moscow’s powerful and controversial mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov, a Communist-style regional boss who has been as active in campaigning against Lebed as Berezovsky has been working for him.

Luzhkov stumped for Zubov before the first round of voting, and the new TV channel he controls through city holdings has unabashedly savaged Lebed.

Krasnoyarsk is thousands of miles from Moscow and unknown to most in the West, but its nickel, minerals and aluminum make it the second richest in natural resources among Russia’s 89 regions. However, that natural abundance contrasts sharply with declining living standards, with real incomes having fallen by 10% in the past five years among the region’s 3 million residents. Unemployment and crime are rising.

In 1996, Yeltsin managed to overcome nationwide dissatisfaction with the meager fruits of reform to win a second term, but analysts doubt that the Kremlin now has the political muscle to prevent disgruntled Siberians from voting in protest of the status quo and in favor of Lebed.

“I don’t expect Zubov to win. It’s very difficult to take the second round if you don’t win in the first,” says Vyacheslav A. Nikonov, Yeltsin’s campaign-era image-maker and head of the Politika analytical agency.

“Yeltsin didn’t lose the first round of the presidential vote, and I’m not sure there’s still anyone in the Kremlin capable of pulling off a repeat of that performance,” he said.