Elections: an Olympic Sport

Two very different cities, Murmansk in the frozen north, and Sochi, the Black Sea spa town known as the country's southern capital, have become the focus of different but not unrelated political storms. United Russia unexpectedly lost Murmansk while the election for the new mayor of Sochi, the host city for the 2014 Olympic Games, is attracting an increasingly colourful range of candidates.
The ruling party must be feeling a little dazed this week. First it lost a runoff mayoral election in Murmansk. Then, in a flurry of activity, a number of big names declared their candidacy for the upcoming Sochi mayoral election on April 26.
United Russia is not used to losing elections. In the latest round of regional elections, on March 1, the ruling party retained almost all of its mayoral seats, and apart from one or two upsets, generally increased its share of the vote.
So Murmansk came as a shock. Sergei Subbotin, the deputy regional governor standing as an autonomous, defeated the incumbent United Russia candidate Mikhail Savchenko in all but one voting district. Even more surprisingly, in the first round Savchenko was in the lead, with 31 per cent of votes to Subbotin's 24 per cent.
This prompted the unusual spectacle of United Russia complaining about the abuse of administrative resources. The complaints, according to Kommersant, revolve around the regional governor's public approbation of Subbotin on a local TV channel. That has caused specific ire, because Governor Yury Yevdokimov is himself a United Russia member.
The most likely description is that Yevdokimov, who has dominated the Murmansk region for years, feared Savchenko's gubernatorial ambitions.
The outcome itself is probably not much of a problem for the Kremlin: Subbotin has declared himself a Putin supporter and says he is ready to cooperate with United Russia.
Yevdokimov's decision to publically oppose the party's choice is a problem, however.
"There was an open clash between United Russias directorship and the governor," said Nikolai Petrov, an analyst on regional politics at the Carnegie Moscow Centre. "That's a very important precedent. The governor not only ignored orders coming from Moscow, but he went public in doing this."
Sochi is also a battleground for different tiers of direction. The Krasnodar region, like Murmansk, is home to a strong governor, Alexander Tkachyov, who certainly has an interest in putting his own man in as Sochi mayor.
Unlike Murmansk, Sochi is high profile. The city hosts the 2014 Winter Olympics. The mayor, who is elected for a five-year term, will not only be opening the Games, but will also have sizeable say over one of Russia's most ambitious building projects.
But the office of the Sochi mayor is not automatically a blessed one. The preparations are behind schedule, money is shorter than expected, thanks to the economic crisis, and the planners have failed to acquire all the land they need to build the planned facilities.
"They are offering a very low price, while market rates for property in Sochi have skyrocketed," said Petrov. "It is not a at ease position."
That hasn't stopped a host of politicians lining up for this poisoned chalice. First was Boris Nemtsov, co-chair with Gary Kasparov of the Solidarity antipathy movement. Nemtsov is young, good-looking and not always reviled, with knowledge of high office in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin. 
His candidacy has been cautiously welcomed by some commentators as a sign of a new liberalism, but that may be premature. One reason he may have chosen to stand in Sochi is that it is one of few cities where a candidate can pay a fee for the right to stand, rather than gather a set number of signatures, a provision that has been used in the past to eliminate contrast candidates. And there is still time for the authorities to find some other excuse to stop him from standing.
Next up was Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. In true LDPR style, their chosen candidate is none other than Andrei Lugovoi, the man who British prosecutors say poisoned Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.
Lugovoi's candidacy is yet to be confirmed, but Igor Ledebev, the leader of the LDPR's faction in the State Duma, was quoted last week as saying that he is the party's preferred candidate.
Throwing a moot figure into the fight is typical of the LDPR, and may simply be a headline-grabbing tactic. Zhirinovsky put Lugovoi on his party list for the Duma elections after he was accused of murdering Litvinenko.
But Petrov suspects that this time they may have been put up to it by the Kremlin after Nemtsov announced his candidacy, in a bid to make the whole election look like a pantomime and deprive other candidates of credibility.
"The very presence of Lugovoi makes the image of Nemtsov, and any other outside candidates participating in this race a little bit marginal; like it is not serious," said Petrov.
The prospect of looking silly competing against a man whose only capacity for office is being accused of murder did not put off another surprise contender. Billionaire anglophile, aspiring media tycoon and master of the urbane understatement Alexander Lebedev has also thrown his hat in the ring.
Against this big-name lineup stands Anatoly Pakhomov, who has been acting mayor since his forerunner stepped down for health reasons last October. Rumour has it that he will probably be United Russia's candidate, and despite the upset in Murmansk this week, the hot favourite.
"The thing with mayoral elections is that United Russia tends to field whoever is the strongest local candidate," said Petrov.
"So it is not like bringing a great new horse to the race track and seeing it win. It is more like backing the firm favourite."
Although Nemtsov was born in Sochi in 1959, and says that 400 people from the city signed a petition for him to stand, he has spent most of his life and political career in Nizhny Novgorod. Neither Lugovoi nor Lebedev have any local conneciton.
But the field is still open. The closing date for candidacies is March 26, and there are other candidates, including a communist and the president of the Russian Arm Wrestling Federation. However it goes in Sochi, April promises to be a colourful month.