Word: kremlins
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...elections that these polls got. Much of the campaign was an enigma. There were few rallies, cross-country tours by party leaders, debates or televised appeals. Instead there was what Russian politicians euphemistically call technology: a stream of invective on state TV. Most of this was instigated by the Kremlin and aimed at discrediting the one bloc thought to present any risk to Boris Yeltsin: the Fatherland-All Russia coalition, led by former Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov and Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov...
...leaders, almost invisible during the campaign, were silent after it. It is a peculiar party. Unity has virtually no platform, almost no organization (especially in contrast to the nation's Communist Party) and only a handful of visible leaders. What it does have is the backing of the Kremlin. The party was formed last September by Sergei Shoigu, who serves as Putin's Emergencies Minister, a position in which he dealt with natural and man-made disasters...
...communists. The communists once again are loudly declaring victory, but Putin is undoubtedly quite satisfied. The communists do not have enough votes to block legislation, but the vote was good enough to encourage communist leader Gennadi Zyuganov to run for President again next June. This is exactly what the Kremlin wants. Kremlin controllers know that Zyuganov, wooden and thin-skinned, is a weak campaigner, and they will be able to pitch the contest as a race between the old and the new. The big loser in the election, however, is Primakov. Few now remember his announcement...
...beat in next summer's presidential election. The Communists held a predictable lead with around 28 percent with most of the vote counted Monday, but the Unity party backed by Putin was running a close second with an unexpectedly high 24 percent, while a second pro-Kremlin party, the Union of Right-Wing Forces, had almost 9 percent. The Fatherland-All Russia coalition headed by former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov and Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkhov, once favored to finish a strong second, looked set to win only 11 percent of the vote...
...result shows how easy it is under the aegis of democratic institutions in Russia to create a top-down pro-Kremlin party from scratch and then, with huge infusions of cash and a stunningly popular patriotic war in Chechnya, build it into a front-runner," says TIME Moscow correspondent Andrew Meier. The result, in which upward of 70 percent of voters appeared to favor parties backing presidential candidates of varying authoritarian stripe (both Putin and Primakov, remember, are products of the KGB), looks set to give President Boris Yeltsin his friendliest legislature since the collapse of communism. But Putin...