That Alexandra Burataeva has come to this mud pit of a town in southern Russia is big news in Baga Burul. That any political figure of any stature would come to Baga Burul is big news. That anyone from Moscow would come here is, well, you get the picture.
Burataeva is holding court in Baga Burul’s dark and dank “House of Culture” on a dark and dank morning because she is running for Russia’s national parliament. Taking time off from her news presenter job at the ORT national network, Burataeva has vowed to visit all corners of the republic of Kalmykia before Sunday’s vote. She wants to tell the people in what she calls the forgotten little places that they are not, in fact, forgotten.
Burataeva has her work cut out. Kalmykia is full of forgotten little places like Baga Burul, and the people will take some convincing that anyone still notices them.
It is much the same across Russia.
As Russians go to the polls Sunday to vote for a new, 450-member Duma, they do so with more skepticism than optimism.
Dirty tricks, nasty propaganda and charges of attempted bribery have plagued the Duma campaigns. Odd candidacies and questionable political unions mark several races. Electoral fraud is a concern in some regions, such as Kalmykia.
If the Duma elections are a test on Russia’s tortured path toward democracy, the nation is in danger of failing.
Beyond that the Duma vote is seen as a precursor for the big prize: the presidential election scheduled for summer 2000. Who comes out on top Sunday could influence who succeeds Boris Yeltsin as president of the world’s second-largest nuclear power.
Voters will be forgiven for being cynical. Or confused.
The pro-Kremlin electoral bloc called Unity, which is gaining strength thanks to the popularity of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, includes a leader of the 1993 attempted putsch against Yeltsin. It is home to a Far East governor whom the Kremlin once tried to oust and to Kalmykia President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. That Ilyumzhinov has been accused of misusing federal funds and angered the Kremlin with veiled threats to take his semiautonomous republic out of the Russian Federation suddenly seems unimportant.
Suspected felons, and some convicted ones too, are vying for seats that give them not only a vote in national affairs but also immunity from prosecution.
In addition, financial tycoons such as Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich, who live and prosper in Moscow, are seeking to represent the poor and distant regions of Karachayevo-Cherkessia and Chukhota, respectively.
Carpetbagger is a common charge. It is heard in Kalmykia as well.
Despite low ratings in the rare opinion poll, Yelena Baturina has become the odds-on favorite to win in Kalmykia. Baturina is a successful Moscow businesswoman who happens to have done great gobs of business with the Kalmyk government. She also happens to be the wife of Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov.
This is where it can really get confusing.
Luzhkov heads the electoral bloc Fatherland-All Russia. Yet Baturina, the 36-year-old wife of the 63-year-old mayor, is not running on the Fatherland ticket but as an independent. Fatherland, in fact, has fielded another candidate to take on Baturina and six other hopefuls.
Baturina, who is shy with the press and declined to be interviewed for this article, has campaigned in Kalmykia only a few times. The slogan on her campaign literature is “Our Man in Moscow.” When she flies in to Elista, the Kalmyk capital, she does so on a chartered jet and is escorted to town by a parade of official cars.
Commercial service to Elista is provided by a company called AviaExpress, which sells inexpensive warm beer on board its battered Yak 40-seater but does not bother with any safety announcements or friendly reminders to buckle the seat belt.
In the final days of the campaign, Baturina’s staff organized a concert, perhaps to save Baturina the chore of having to meet voters one on one. At an earlier stump event, a man asked Baturina what her economic program was. According to a person in the audience, she called the question a provocation.
Expectations of fraud
So what makes Kalmyks, including some of Baturina’s opponents, think she will win? Support from on high.
Critics of Ilyumzhinov, the flamboyant Kalmyk president whom human-rights activists accuse of repressing dissent, charge the government with plotting major electoral fraud.
Previous elections in Kalmykia were marred by allegations of ballot stuffing and voter intimidation. Few expect this next one to be much better.
“I don’t know exactly how it will turn out,” said Gennady Yudin, whose wife was slain last year as she investigated government corruption for the region’s lone opposition newspaper.
“I can say that the election will not be clean,” said Yudin, who now runs the paper. “The authorities here don’t want to make them clean. They wouldn’t know how to make them clean.”
Opposition candidates from Yabloko and Fatherland talk of ballots already set aside to be filled in and substituted for real ones. Vote buying has already begun, party workers charge.
This fear explains a large chunk of Burataeva’s stump speech. She urges Russians distrustful of the electoral process to put aside their doubts and vote, confident that they will not choose Baturina, hopeful that a high turnout would negate any attempts at fraud.
“It’s been five years that I have lived in Moscow, and I am shocked at how bad things have gotten here,” said Burataeva, 34, bumping along roads so bad they seem to have been blasted by artillery. She looks out across open fields, the famous steppe of southern Russia.
There are monuments to men on horseback, but no horses. There are signs for sheep and cattle crossings, but few sheep or cattle.
“When I was a girl my father used to take me through here, and it was sheep and livestock as far as you could see. They were everywhere,” she said. “Now, look. Nothing.”
Indeed, in the last five years alone, Kalmykia has seen its sheep population fall to about 400,000 from nearly 3 million. The rule of thumb used to be 10 sheep for every resident, but now with Kalmykia nearly holding steady at 300,000 people, it is closing on 1-1.
“We survive by selling things. Things from our house. Things we can grow sometimes,” said Vera, 30, a resident of Baga Burul. “But you know, we are running out of things.”
Baga Burul’s 700 people are lucky to subsist. Their lights go out several hours a day. They go without water for days in a row during the summer. Their doctor is now a long bus ride away, if the bus is running, if the patient can buy the gas to run the bus.
Their problem is the problem of many people in agricultural Russia. The people of Baga Burul were supposedly given the land that used to make up the region’s collective farm. But they have no rights to buy or sell the land, no chance to borrow off the land to invest in livestock or seed or a tractor or anything else needed to build an agricultural business.
“Sure, we have the land on paper,” Vera said. “But we have no transport to get there, no equipment to work it.”
The people greet Burataeva with warmth, peppering her with intelligent questions, crowding around her for autographs. She is one of them, a descendant of the Mongol nomads who came to Kalmykia in the 17th Century, perhaps even of those Mongol warriors who conquered Central Asia and much of the Caucasus centuries ago. She is an ethnic Kalmyk, a Kalmychka who made good in the center of the Russian universe.
She is a also television star.
Despite their best wishes for Burataeva, many Kalmyks wonder whether she has a chance. They also treat her vows to make life better much as they treat other promises from other politicians–with dismissal bordering on derision.
“I’m just waiting for someone to do something for us and then come back and talk about it,” said Irina, 30, standing in front of a Soviet-era Socialist Realism painting that urges people to work hard and aim high. “I cannot remember the last time our school got a new piece of equipment, for example, and we keep asking.”
Burataeva says she has held meetings by candlelight in towns without power. She has heard stories of wrenching poverty, profound desperation.
“It’s like 1941 in some parts,” she said. “People are going hungry and our government is building Chess City or City Chess, or whatever Kirsan wants to call it.”
All motives suspect
“Kirsan” is how most everyone refers to Ilyumzhinov. He is a fascinating character, to be sure, an impeccable dresser and confident speaker, affable, engaging and, according to his critics, completely out of touch with the reality of his republic.
Ilyumzhinov built Chess City–or City Chess, as the aspiring English speaker calls it–to host the World Chess Olympics last year. It cost an estimated $30 million, with a lot of the construction contracts going to Baturina’s company.
The Olympics drew 1,000 players and was deemed a great success by Ilyumzhinov, 37, who is also president of the International Chess Federation. But Chess City is deeply troubled now, with few takers for the apartments the government is trying to sell.
The government owes millions of dollars on the project, including to Baturina’s company. That fact is always proffered when Ilyumzhinov’s critics explain why she is running and why she is expected to win.
Ilyumzhinov laughs away suggestions that he favors Baturina. He rejects allegations that the state-controlled media ignores everyone but Baturina and a couple of other candidates.
He says he supports all of the candidates, including Burataeva, and he defends Baturina against charges of carpetbagging.
“I think it is good that someone so influential from Moscow wants to represent us,” Ilyumzhinov said of his administration’s major creditor. “It would be one thing if someone wanted to use Kalmykia for their own selfish political career, but I don’t see that here.”
Burataeva, meanwhile, has faced questions about her motives. Her opponents say she was set up in Kalmykia by Berezovsky, a Kremlin confidant and would-be kingmaker who is the power behind the scenes at ORT.
Berezovsky, according to this reasoning, wanted someone to counter Luzhkov and Luzhkov’s chief electoral ally, former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov.
“I think the question of why she is here should not be put to Baturina,” said Vitaly Daginov, who represents Fatherland-All Russia. “I want to know what Burataeva is doing here. She is the property of Berezovsky.”
Burataeva is running on the Unity ticket, which many political analysts contend was set up by Berezovsky and other members of the so-called Yeltsin family–the tight circle of relatives and advisers said to create Kremlin policy. Her campaign staff is filled with hired guns chosen by an outside political consultant. Burataeva does not even know the names of some of her advance staff.
In her defense, Burataeva said she planned her candidacy long before Luzhkov and Primakov created Fatherland, long before Unity came about. She joined the Unity ticket, she said, as a practical concern. She figured she had no hope without its backing.
The move has paid off. With Putin and the Kremlin behind Unity, with its popularity rising, Ilyumzhinov is under increased pressure to let the voters have their say, even if that means Baturina goes down in defeat.
As for Berezovsky, Burataeva said that if she were on his payroll she would have chosen a place where campaigning was more comfortable, the odds of winning more favorable and the Duma seat more profitable.
Rising tide of criticism
Such cynicism and complexity is being repeated across Russia.
Under pressure from the Kremlin, ORT and other news media have launched withering attacks on Luzhkov and Fatherland. The Internet is full of sites floating half-baked conspiracies and unproven charges against the leading parties.
Fatherland has suffered as a result. Once considered the favorite to capture a plurality and perhaps even a majority of Duma seats, it now trails the Communists by several percentage points and may be overtaken by Unity for the second spot.
Luzhkov was expected to breeze to re-election as Moscow mayor but has had to step up his campaign in the last few days. He was unusually subdued last week after another round of personal and political attacks on him and his allies.
“Democracy and freedom of expression were our only accomplishments in the decade of so-called reforms,” said Luzhkov, not normally seen as a crusader for human rights but a man who has shown faith in the ballot box. “Unfortunately we have lost them too.”
After Sunday, Luzhkov’s wife might see it differently. But then, so too might the people of Kalmykia.
