Chechnya's troubled election

One of the few independent opinion surveys on the election, by the Moscow-based Validata polling agency in Chechnya's 15 districts in June, found Kadyrov running a distant fourth in popularity. Since then, all the leading candidates have withdrawn from the race.

In the Validata poll, ex-Russian parliamentary speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov ranked first, chosen by 25.7 percent of Chechens. Mr. Khasbulatov, now an economics professor in Moscow, was the first to drop his candidacy, in July. "There are no conditions for holding honest elections in Chechnya," he says.

Next to go was Khusein Dzhabrailov, scion of a powerful Chechen business family, who was not included in the June poll but was said by experts to have serious support in the republic. He quit two weeks ago, telling journalists that he thought he could be more useful by directing his efforts "toward improving dialogue among Chechens."

Malik Saidullayev, a Moscow-based Chechen businessman who ranked second in the Validata survey with the support of 23.3 percent, was removed last week by Chechnya's supreme court after being accused of submitting phony signatures on his nomination form.

The only other serious contender, Aslanbek Aslakhanov, Chechnya's only deputy in the Russian State Duma, who polled 22.4 per cent in the June survey, quit the race last week after receiving a phone call from President Putin, offering him a Kremlin job. Mr. Aslakhanov told journalists that "[Putin] asked me whether I wanted to work in the structures of executive power and proposed the post of his assistant responsible for the south of Russia and Chechnya. I consulted my team and gave my consent."

The chain of resignations leaves Kadyrov as front-runner, though the June poll suggested that just 13.1 percent of Chechen voters supported him. Seven lesser candidates still remain in the running, but Sergei Khaikin, research director of the Validata agency dismisses them all as "nonentities." Other experts agree. "There were some serious personalities involved, but now they are gone," says Alexander Iskandaryan, director of the Center for Caucasian Studies, based in Yerevan, Armenia. "Among those left, there is not a single outstanding personality. I don't think that happened by chance."

In early September, armed members of Kadyrov's 2,000-man security force, headed by the acting president's son Ramzan, occupied the offices of Chechnya's only television station and all eight of the republic's newspapers.

"Chechnya is under Kadyrov's full control, and he has demonstrated that he can do whatever he wants," says Nikolai Petrov, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow. "No elections are going to change that fact."

Some experts say Kadyrov may have made himself indispensible to the Kremlin by clamping his personal control on the unruly republic, and now Mr. Putin cannot afford to let him fail.

"Putin has cornered himself, and now he's Kadyrov's hostage," says Mr. Petrov. "Now it's the Kremlin's problem to explain to the international community how this all happened in Chechnya."

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