With almost 50 per cent of the votes in Mr Vladimir Putin was set to win Russia's presidency in the first round amidst allegations of widespread vote-rigging from his opponents. Most complaints centred on a period of almost four hours in which no results were issued. Then suddenly, Mr Putin's tally jumped from 47 per cent to 49.5 per cent, rising an hour later to 50.01 per cent.
The head of the central electoral committee explained the abrupt rise in Mr Putin's tally to results from his native city of St Petersburg where he gained more than 60 per cent support and also to his strong showing in the Moscow region. Early returns from the capital, however, indicated that Mr Putin received only 44 per cent of the votes there.
The communist leader, Mr Gennady Zyuganov, who polled higher than expected at 30.77 per cent told viewers on the NTV channel he suspected massive falsification. This had been the case in the 1996 election in which he lost to Mr Boris Yeltsin, he said, and it was likely the same had happened again. He cited the cities of Kursk and Lipetsk and Muslim areas of Russia as places where vote fraud had taken place. TV footage showed soldiers using an easily tampered-with cardboard box being used as a ballot box in Chechnya. When opened it contained few ballot papers.
The democratic Mr Grigory Yavlinsky was lying in third place on 5.58 per cent in results announced at 3.00 a.m. Moscow time but was reported to be running neck-and-neck with Mr Zyuganov for second place in Moscow with both candidates on 20 per cent. He, too, claimed fraud and produced a document which he said showed that in the district of Ulan Ude in eastern Siberia the number of votes exceeded the number of voters on the register by 14,000.
The overall turnout at 67.7 per cent was more than enough to declare the election valid according to the terms of the Russian Constitution. Mr Putin appeared briefly at his election headquarters to say he would, if elected, get to work immediately on selecting a cabinet.
Bitter exchanges between candidates followed the announcement that Mr Putin would get the 50 per cent necessary to avoid a run-off ballot. Movie director Stanislav Govorukhin who polled 0.7 per cent said he did not blame Mr Putin for the situation. The Russian voters had acted like serfs, he said.
But Ms Lilya Shevtsova of the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow said the results would put pressure on Mr Putin to take democratic points of view into account. The vote for Mr Yavlinsky in Moscow and St Petersburg was so strong, she said, that it could not be ignored.
Mr Leonid Radzhikovsky of the newspaper Segodnya, regard ed as one of Russia's more astute political commentators, said Candidates of a democratic orientation had been marginalised by Mr Putin's electoral machine.
