Running For Their Lives In Russia, Politics Is A Risky Profession

Two more parliamentary election contenders reported mysterious assaults Tuesday, boosting the campaign casualty list and illustrating how the political contest has become a dangerous run for the candidates’ lives.

A prominent deputy of the liberal Russia’s Choice movement, Anatoly Y. Shabad, was run down on a central Moscow street by a car whose occupants briefly emerged to check his condition, then fled, his son reported.

In the other incident, a candidate from the Caucasus Mountains region around Mineralniye Vody told the Interfax news agency that his car was fired on by unknown assailants before dawn Tuesday.

On the heels of three slayings on the campaign trail in little more than two weeks, the latest incidents underscored the dangers confronting participants in unruly Russia’s second multi-party election.

Voters go to the polls Sunday to choose the 450-seat lower house of parliament, the State Duma.

The head of the Christian-Democratic Union, Vitaly V. Savitsky, was the victim of a fatal car crash in St. Petersburg on Saturday. Although investigators described the collision as a routine traffic accident, colleagues have claimed it was an assassination by those whose illegal activities were the targets of Savitsky’s environmental and religious crusading.

A candidate from the centrist Our Home is Russia coalition, Mikhail Lezhnev, was gunned down outside his home in the Ural Mountains city of Chelyabinsk early Friday. An incumbent deputy with the small Union of December 12 faction, Sergei A. Markidonov, was found shot to death along with his bodyguard in a Siberian hotel room in late November.

Three other members of the current Duma have been shot or beaten to death since the first parliamentary elections were held two years ago.

Russian state television suggested that the accident at about 7:30 p.m. Monday that sent Shabad to the hospital with a concussion and leg fracture was the result of his jaywalking on a dark side street.

The Independent Television network, however, noted that there was virtually no traffic at the time, as neither Monday nor Tuesday were working days due to the Constitution Day holiday.

The younger Shabad, a journalist, said there was too little information about the incident for him to judge whether it might have been a premeditated attempt on his father’s life.