Few outside Russia pay attention to who's getting elected in the boonies. They'd better wake up. At the grass roots, Russia is going communist again.
In two key regions of the Russian Federation, communist candidates were elected to the governorships Sunday.

No fluke elections, they are of enormous importance, politically and geographically, for these reasons:


• They tipped the scales.

Only 10 years after the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 45 of the 89 regions of the Russian federation are now in the hands of Communist Party governors.


• Within Russia, that is not considered startling.

With shrugs of their shoulders, Russians in the streets have increasingly come to accept communist governors as the wave of the future, just one more reflection of the economic hard times besetting the Motherland.


• In both of Sunday's regional elections, a little more than a third of the eligible voters turned out – below par for Russians in the decade during which they have had the vote.

It is being regarded as a sense of resignation among Russian voters, who have seen little improvement in their lives since the advent of a democratic form of government in 1991 to replace the dictatorship of the Soviet Union.

Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, likes to say that people are once more turning to the Communists because the decade of reforms – beginning with Boris Yeltsin and continuing under his successor, President Vladimir Putin – has not delivered the fruits promised.


• The communist governorships are being considered as working to Putin's advantage.

As the Russian newspaper Izvestia put it: "It is clear that it makes no difference for the Kremlin what [political] color the governor is. The main point is that he should be loyal to the president and the government."


• These communist election victories occurred in areas traditionally least likely to be hospitable to communism.

According to Izvestia, "the Communists have [in past elections there] been supported by fewer voters than in the country on an average."


• Nor did these latest elections take place in some "red spot" of concentrated communist power on the sprawling map of Russia, which spans 11 time zones – nearly half-way around the globe.

The capital cities of the two regions involved in Sunday's elections are more than 4,000 miles apart.


• They are in regions crucial to Russia's economic power – and, in one instance, to its relationship with communist China because it is so close to the Russian-Chinese border.

One of the elections was held in the Nizhni Novgorod region, known during the Soviet Union days as Gorky. It is a lynchpin in the Russian economy.

Although about 250 miles east of Moscow, it is looked upon as an industrial subsidiary of the Russian capital. Nizhni Novgorod is one of the country's half-dozen largest metropolitan areas, a major industrial center producing aircraft, automobiles and trucks, agricultural machinery, plastics, textiles and electrical equipment.

The victor there was Gennady Khodyrev, who was once the senior secretary of the Gorky Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The other region electing a communist governor this week is Irkutsk, lying north of Mongolia.

The city of Irkutsk, near the shore of Lake Baikal, is a principal center of commerce on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Throughout its history it has looked to trade with China and the Amur Valley, a border area of contention between Russia and China.

One of the purposes of the recent Moscow-Beijing Treaty of Friendship was to dampen those tensions.

Now, a communist Irkutsk, so close to communist China, could well send a chilling signal to Putin.