“PARTY OF POWER” PURGES ITS RANKS.

Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin’s “Russia is Our Home” electoral bloc has begun to purge its ranks of non-apparatus people, Moscow News reported this week. Duma speaker Ivan Rybkin’s electoral bloc did the same. In this as well as in the blessing of the Russian president that both blocs enjoy and in the efforts by Chernomyrdin to exploit the state apparatus for his own political purposes, the two electoral groupings represent the restoration of a home for the nomenklatura, the senior officials who ran the former Soviet Union through the communist party. One public sign of this restoration in the way the Russian elite does business was the removal of Ludmila Vartasarova, who had been the leader of the analytic service for Rybkin’s group. She was removed for failing to carry out the orders of her superiors. The two blocs do not need any independent minds, Moscow News concluded.

Moscow Does Not Care About People, Poll Suggests.