YELTSIN MONITORS ELECTORAL CAMPAIGN FOR "POLITICAL CORRECTNESS."

The chief of the Presidential administration, Sergei Filatov, told the media that Boris Yeltsin is closely monitoring the course of the Russian electoral campaign without intervening in it. He said that the president is generally satisfied with the campaign, but would like to see the electorate reject groups and parties of the extreme left and right. Filatov added that he is personally quite concerned about the participation of "criminal elements" in the campaign. According to Filatov, entire criminal entities, and not just individual criminals, are taking part in the campaign, and in some cases even nominate their lists of candidates directly from their prison cells.

Meanwhile, central election commission chief Nikolai Ryabov revealed that the recently developed national computerized election system would not be used either in this year’s parliamentary elections or in the 1996 presidential elections. Ryabov admitted that the plan to introduce this computerized government-run election system caused a tremendous uproar from the major political parties, but did not mention that the reason for this uproar was that the chief designer of this system was one of the KGB’s successor agencies, the Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information (FAPSI). 4

Government Overture to Skokov-Lebed Party ?