With the support of President Boris Yeltsin, Russia's military is trying to influence parliamentary politics in a highly unusual way, running a slate of officers in the Dec. 17 election for the lower house of Parliament.
Yeltsin's loyal defense minister, Gen. Pavel Grachev, has organized 123 officers, including 23 generals, to run in the head-to-head local constituency contests that will fill half the 450 seats.Many of these districts contain large military bases. Their soldiers, most of them badly paid and housed, might be expected - together with their spouses, relatives and adult children - to vote for the designated officers.
The other half of the seats will be filled proportionally according to a separate party vote. The military has not organized its own party, but most of the main ones among the 43 parties and blocs running have military men among their top candidates.
Even now in Russia, some 1.5 million men and women serve in the military, and another 2.5 million also wear uniforms - in the Interior Ministry, police, border guards and so on. It is estimated that about half of Russia's 105 million voters have some connection to the military or to the military industry, which has also suffered from the changes in the country.
Many people believe that the Grachev slate is intended by the Kremlin to take military votes away from the Communists, ultranationalists and the populist former general Aleksandr Lebed, said Dmitri Trenin, a former army officer and an analyst for the Carnegie Endowment.
"The Kremlin is thinking very hard, and Kremlin and Defense Ministry officials are not likely to tolerate anything perceived as anti-Yeltsin," Trenin said.
The main target is the Communists and ultranationalists. "It's aimed at Lebed in a more distant way," Trenin said. "He's an issue for June 1996," when the presidential election is scheduled, "not so much for 1995."
For all the concern expressed here and abroad about the new-look Communist Party running better in the opinion polls than anyone else, officials around the ailing Yeltsin are fairly calm. The poll figures are not as dire as they seem, and the structure of the election is likely to produce many centrist legislators from local districts.
Even if the polls prove unreliable and the two parties together receive 24 or 25 percent of the vote - Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist, shocked the world with his 22.8 percent in December 1993 - Kremlin officials note that the popular vote for parties fills only half the seats.
In 1993, for example, Zhirinovsky's party won only six seats in head-to-head contests. So his 22.8 percent of the vote turned into only 14 percent of the seats, and the currently faltering liberal party of Yegor Gaidar, Russia's Choice, was the largest party in the lower house.
Most of those running in the local contests are provincial notables, mayors or administrative bosses who list themselves as independent but who are likely to favor Russia's bureaucratic elite and a form of the status quo. The military slate will compete with this second part of the vote.