Communist comeback in Russia's free-market bastion

A communist swept to victory yesterday as the governor of Nizhny-Novgorod, the third largest city in Russia and a reformist bastion once regarded as a shining example of free-market reform.

Gennady Khodyrev, a Communist member of the Russian Duma, the lower house of parliament, won the election by a margin of 60 per cent over the previous governor, Ivan Sklyarov, who has been blamed for the economic decline of the city formerly known as Gorky.

After his victory, Mr Khodyrev suspended his membership of the Communist Party, apparently to avoid a clash with the government in Moscow. The Kremlin had threatened that it might transfer the capital of the Volga region to another city if a Communist became governor.

The success of Mr Khodyrev, who was once a regional Communist Party first secretary, caught political experts in Moscow by surprise. The win shows that the Communists still have a core of voters who can win elections when the turnout is low. In this case, it was 38 per cent.

Many voters felt that the city had failed to produce the booming economy promised by market reforms, and that in the past five years it had fallen behind its rival cities including Moscow and St Petersburg.

In Soviet times, the city, home to the GAZ car and truck maker, was where Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and dissident, and his wife, Yelena Bonner, lived during their internal exile.

Mr Khodyrev benefited from a dirty election campaign that affected all candidates. Vadim Bulavinov, a Duma deputy and favourite to win the first round, was hurt by a mailshot linking him to an unpopular plan to import nuclear waste.