Party Led By Putin Steamrolls Opponents

United Russia's vote has never matched Putin's personal election figures, and even with Putin at the top of the ticket, vaulting to 70 percent is a daunting challenge, according to opinion polls. In the most recent regional elections, in March 2007, the party got 46 percent on average.

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In interviews, organizers in 10 regions for opposition groups including the Communist Party, the Union of Right Forces, Yabloko and Fair Russia uniformly complained of official harassment, of being shut out of the media and of voters being threatened with loss of livelihood or position if they fail to vote for United Russia.

In the Siberian region of Kemerovo, for instance, opposition parties said they learned that the governor had demanded undated resignation letters from all district administrators, to take effect if United Russia draws less than 70 percent of the vote in their areas.

The district administrators, in turn, demanded resignation letters from their deputies. "You now have bureaucrats threatening pensioners that their heat will be cut off unless they vote for United Russia," Alexey Roshin, a Communist Party official in Kemerovo, said in a telephone interview. "And you know, this is Siberia. It's cold here. . . . There was always some pressure, some tricks, but the difference now is huge."

Sergey Cheremnov, a spokesman for Kemerovo Gov. Aman Tuleyev, who is heading United Russia's local party list, dismissed the allegations. "It's an absurdity," he said in a telephone interview. "It sounds like somebody's stupid joke."

In Perm, a city in the Urals, Tatyana Volegova, who runs the small Yabloko party's elections headquarters, said activists are routinely detained by police when they attempt to canvass voters. "In one village, we had young women handing out leaflets, and they were all put in cells with drunks for three hours," Volegova said. "When they were released, they were told not to come back."

In Nizhny Novgorod, Oleg Repin, a regional organizer and candidate for the Union of Right Forces, said that billboards the party had reserved last summer were suddenly unavailable when the campaign began.

Even Fair Russia, a party that was created by the Kremlin with Putin's open blessing, complains about the stifling of competition. "We cannot call these elections honest," said Dmitry Gudkov, a spokesman for the party, some of whose leading candidates have been threatened with arrest or had their offices searched.

In Mordovia, about 400 miles southeast of Moscow, Vladimir Vasiliev, a 26-year-old graduate student and Union of Right Forces candidate, said police came to his mother's apartment to fetch him for military service, then put him on a wanted list as a draft dodger when they failed to find him. As an enrolled student and a candidate, Vasiliev said, he should be exempt from military service.

The party's regional organizer was beaten up and left the area, Vasiliev said, and a warehouse where the party stored election newspapers was broken into and the literature slashed with chain saws and smeared with oil. "Our campaign has been paralyzed," he said.

Nationally, about 20 million pieces of Union of Right Forces campaign literature were seized by authorities, the party said. By its count, 17 of its leading candidates have resigned after being told by local authorities that their businesses or families would suffer if they did not.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Union of Right Forces had violated Russia's campaign law by failing to properly account for its funding of election literature, a charge the party denies.

"I would totally disagree with you that those people were threatened who abandoned their lists," Peskov said in a meeting with a small group of foreign journalists this week. "If parties are losing members of their lists, the best way for them is to blame everything on the Kremlin. . . . This is just an attempt to cover the disorder in this party."