Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 4, 1990 TAG: 9003042058
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-16 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL KELLER THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Long
A last-minute survey of the Oktobr district of Moscow showed the tide running against the communist establishment and in favor of Zaslavsky's slate in today's local elections.
"He's smelling victory already," smiled the pollster, Aleksei Levinson, who urged his client to target a few working-class high-rise apartment buildings for a final wall-poster assault.
Zaslavsky, a 30-year-old member of the Soviet Parliament, is part of a new and increasingly sophisticated network of pro-democracy insurgents from within and outside the Communist Party who believe they have a real chance today to wrest control of Moscow and other cities from the party regulars.
More than a million seats are at stake in the electoral sweepstakes that American diplomats have dubbed Slavic Super Sunday, elections to local councils and republic parliaments in Russia, the Ukraine, and Byelorussia.
Hampered by voter confusion, the Communist Party's domination of the electoral laws, and their own inexperience, groups advocating greater democracy are doubtful of winning control of the Slavic heartland as a whole.
But with the help of campaign techniques borrowed from the West, they have mounted their most formidable challenges in Moscow, Leningrad, and other big cities.
If they succeed, they have audacious plans.
"In the districts and cities where we take power, we will register new parties," Zaslavsky said over tea last week after a day of barnstorming. "We'll publish newspapers, create free radio stations, support democrats in other districts.
"`What we have now is a permanent revolution, and not the kind Lenin or Trotsky had in mind."
Yuri Prokofiev, the Moscow Communist Party chief, conceded the insurgents stand a fair chance of winning a majority in the 498-member Moscow City Council and naming one of their own as the city's chief executive.
"Well, I see no harm in it, and if it happens we will cooperate," Prokofiev said, although he regards most of the opposition as political dilettantes who do not really want to take responsibility for cratered streets and empty stores.
The ruling Communists have not delivered on their promise to legalize rival parties, but in each of the republics preparing for today's balloting, opponents had stitched together a coalition to take on the communist monopoly.
In the Russian Republic, the umbrella group Democratic Russia includes the anti-Stalinist group Memorial, the Moscow Voters Association, the Association of Social Democrats, and a patchwork of local Popular Fronts and communist clubs impatient with the mainstream party.
The candidates differ on specific planks, but share a commitment to unfettered, multiparty democracy and more Western-style market economics, and a general sense that Gorbachev has frittered away his credibility in making compromises.
Independents who won seats in the Soviet Parliament last year are spreading their coattails.
Boris Yeltsin, a leader of the opposition faction in the Soviet Parliament, is campaigning for the Russian Republic's legislature and trying to take enough like-minded candidates with him to be chosen the republic's president. Soviet law allows a politician to hold elected positions at any two levels.
Others like Zaslavsky are focusing on local councils, hoping to create little islands of power.
Zaslavsky has organized seminars for candidates, consulted psychologists on preparing election materials, and enlisted writers with connections to printing presses.
He has tapped a non-partisan civic fund to get around campaign spending limits.
He often speaks to three voter meetings a day, taking questions from the audience for two hours at each stop.
Levinson's polls give Zaslavsky a local approval rating Gorbachev would envy. Zaslavsky's team has used political polling more extensively than any independent political group in the past.
By all accounts, the toughest battle for independent candidates has been getting the attention of voters dazed by the new profusion of politics.
Most voters will be confronted today with at least four ballots containing the names of 30 or more candidates in all.
The six-week election sprint has allowed little time for individual candidates to distinguish themselves.
"Where there is a clear choice between a party-apparatus candidate and a progressive candidate, it is nine to one the democrat wins," Levinson said. "So the party strategy has been to hide who is who."
"This problem of who's who is now the central problem," agreed Vladimir O. Bokser, a campaign coordinator for the Moscow Voters Association.
"People will come to vote, they'll see 15 names, and the only information they have to go on is the name, the place of work, and the candidate's job."
Although the election law banned advertising and required that all material be printed by supposedly neutral election commissions, it is clear from the papered walls of any Moscow housing complex that both the party and its challengers have circumvented that rule with abandon.
Supporters of the democracy slate have stuffed mailboxes with lists of candidates - the Soviet equivalent of palm cards - and finagled enough paper to print thousands of wall posters boasting of their independence from the Communist machine.
"We're having a lot of difficulties making copies of the list because practically all typesetting shops are controlled," Bokser said.
"The only thing that will work now are these lists. If we manage to spread them, I have no doubts about the outcome of the elections."
by CNB