MEANWHILE, IN THE DEEP, DARK RUSSIAN HEARTLAND...

By PAUL QUINN-JUDGE/SOGRA

Six years ago, the visit of the regional Communist Party chief--in those days a figure of almost unimaginable power and privilege--would have been a momentous occasion for Sogra, a village located 580 miles northeast of Moscow. Earlier this month, however, when former regional first secretary Yuri Guskov (now a member of the Russian parliament and a big man in the diamond business) came to campaign for Communist presidential candidate Gennadi Zyuganov, he drew a crowd generously estimated at 20.

Guskov's visit is something of a joke among village officials here, who say they voted for Boris Yeltsin. Nevertheless, it was the only sign offered to Sogra that a life-and-death struggle for the Russian presidency was under way. No representative of any of the other nine candidates came, no one put up posters, no one delivered flyers. "Why would anyone come here?" asked the chairman of the village council, Vladimir Romanov. "The nearest paved road is 100 km away."

The village notables had planned to organize a committee to re-elect the President. "But we didn't get around to it," said the head teacher, Nikolai Lychev. Anyway, he added, the regional Yeltsin campaign headquarters in Arkhangel'sk did not send any materials till the day before the vote. By then, campaigning was prohibited. Yeltsin won Sogra and the surrounding villages anyway. He received 538 votes; Zyuganov came in second with 378, followed by General Alexander Lebed with 262 and Vladimir Zhirinovsky a distant fourth.

One of the most visible results of the June 16 vote has been some unusually sustained drinking among the village officials and their friends. They are drinking their way through the money they got for organizing the election. Because of a mass hangover, the radio in the village office had been turned off the morning that news broke of the power struggle between General Lebed and Yeltsin's security chiefs. No one heard the reports. Villagers who did learn of the Kremlin intrigue seemed to find it less gripping than the Brazilian soap opera they had watched the night before. Igor Dudinsky shrugged off the radio reports as he tucked into a breakfast of cream cheese and fish soup. "The devil knows what that all means," he said.

Sogra was settled in the 1400s, and many of its inhabitants speak a centuries-old dialect of Russian. Places like this one, home to perhaps a quarter of Russia's population, are popularly known as the glubinka--the depths of the countryside. And like other such villages, Sogra is in crisis. Ten births--and 50 deaths--have been recorded this year. Vodka is one of the main killers. Of the 2,900 people in the area, 1,100 are pensioners. Forty percent of the working-age residents do not have jobs. The village's main employer, a logging combine, went bankrupt last year; the other source of work, the state farm, may well slaughter the rest of its herd this winter.

Given this miserable situation, Romanov was asked, why did so many people vote for Yeltsin? A long pause. "I don't know," he said. Lychev, the schoolteacher, expressed disdain for Yeltsin but voted for him anyway. "It was a case of the lesser evil," he said. "The one thing I wanted to avoid was a turn back to the past." The village's fierce pharmacist, Tamara Bechina, who supports Zyuganov, had this explanation: "They voted for Yeltsin because they're benighted. They voted for Yeltsin because their bosses 'suggested' they do so." The village doctor, Lyubov Chuvikova, will also vote for Zyuganov in the second round. "Life has never been as devoid of hope or of any way out as it is now."

--By Paul Quinn-Judge/Sogra