In Russia, a field of candidates with big dreams

If grand ambitions were votes, the 4,500 candidates battling for seats in Russia's lower house, or Duma, couldn't be more evenly matched, as they set out to change the world.

They nurse dreams of reviving Russia's prestige in the world, of turning the country into a democracy that offers fairer opportunities for all - rich or poor - and of fixing everything from the health system to orphanages.

But for many candidates, testing political waters for the first time for the Dec. 7 vote, the campaign trail is an obstacle course. Campaign war chests are empty, Russian voters are lethargic and suspicious of their motives, and spreading their message is an all-but-impossible task.

"Apathy of the voters is the main problem here," says candidate Alexander Kapelyush, one of 29 candidates running for just two district seats in Kursk, a region about 300 miles south of Moscow. "They don't believe their problems can be solved. They believe everything is already decided, that these aren't real elections."

Deep in Russia's conservative "red belt," where many feel a nostalgia for the Soviet era, Kursk is a window on the state of democracy in the new Russia. No-name, penniless contenders struggle against impossible odds. Many voters, weary of the hardships of just earning a living, have little patience for hearing yet more promises.

Yet there are signs that Russia is gaining electoral maturity. The local election commission adheres strictly to the letter of Russia's vast electoral law - codified for the first time in a large, hardcover tome the size of a telephone book.

And while the talk in Moscow is of President Vladimir Putin clamping down on democracy across Russia, those committed to change in Kursk, an industrial city of nearly half a million, are offering voters a smorgasbord of choices.

The candidates range from the wealthy and controversial Alexander Rutskoi - Russia's first vice president, who led the antireform coup against Boris Yeltsin in October 1993, was imprisoned, and later won a landslide victory as Kursk's regional governor - to a fresh-faced college student. The field also includes a housewife, an unemployed activist with a tractor, lawyers, titans of business, and a surgeon.

Anatoly Nevezhin, a retired former military commissioner of Kursk, isn't as worried about his competition as he is about getting out his platform of social justice. He says he only has funds for a "small number of leaflets" to remind voters that too many people are left out in a nation where "doctors and soldiers don't live, they just survive" on low pay. So far in Russia, he says, "Democracy is only for rich people."

Also having trouble reaching out - despite a few minutes of free air time granted to each candidate by local television stations - is Denis Eschenko, a student and businessman who is now studying to be a lawyer. At 24, he is one of the youngest Duma hopefuls. He was inspired to join the fray by his mother, a longtime consumer-rights activist, who ran and lost in a recent local election.

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