Paper alleges abuses in Russian elections

A CLOSE associate of President Yeltsin has been involved with a group of former KGB officers planning to falsify or cancel Russia's presidential elections scheduled for June, according to the Boston Globe.

The newspaper, quoting "senior US intelligence officials", also reports that Mr Yeltsin is in urgent need of heart surgery and has a life expectancy of about two years or even less.

Mr Yeltsin's head of security, the former KGB Gen Alexander Korzhakov, is cited in the Boston Globe as having close links with an underground group of former KGB officers called Felix.

There were two scenarios for a possible postponement of the June elections, according to the newspaper's sources. The more benign move would see the reunification of the Russian Federation and Belarus, the only former Soviet republic which has expressed willingness to unite with Moscow.

This would provide an excuse to postpone the presidential vote until the amalgamation process was complete.

The malign and more dramatic scenario would involve a series of violent acts in Chechnya or elsewhere, staged by Felix.

Should the elections go ahead on schedule, the Boston Globe reports, there was a danger of manipulation of the results. The results of the December parliamentary elections had been "subtly altered" to push the figures of parties led by the reformist former prime minister, Mr Yegor Gaidar, and the right wing Gen Alexander Lebed below the 5 per cent necessary for representation in the Duma.

Members of the country's Central Election Commission expressed concern at possible tampering with results of the 1993 parliamentary elections and a simultaneously held referendum on a new constitution which gave Mr Yeltsin increased powers.

Sudden and unexpected delays in the counting process in the parliamentary elections of December last led to suspicions of tampering. Intelligence sources were "quoted by the Boston Globe as expecting these may have been a "practice run" for the presidential polls.

As far as Mr Yeltsin's health was concerned, the report said that he has had four heart attacks, since 1987 and without prompt, surgery his life expectancy was unlikely to be "more than a couple of years, and could conceivably be much less.

The report also said that in the course of Mr Yeltsin's visit to the G-7 summit in Halifax, Nova Scotia, last June, Gen Korzhakov plied the Russian President with alcohol in the elevator or anywhere else that provided a moment's escape from the glare of publicity.

Mr Yeltsin's support in opinion, polls has dropped to single figures mainly because of the disastrous war in Chechnya.

In Grozny and other areas of Chechnya yesterday, Chechens demonstrated to mark the 52nd anniversary of the mass deportation of their kinfolk from their homeland in the northern Caucasus to the steppes of central Asia. Thousands died on the journey. After Stalin's death, the Chechens were allowed to return.

Chechnya became part of the Tsarist Empire in 1859 after a mountain war which lasted 40 years.

In September 1991, following the failed hard line coup against the then Soviet president, Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, the local Chechen government, which had supported the coup, resigned and Gen Dzhokhai Dudayev, of the Soviet air force, installed himself as president, of a breakaway state. The situation was tolerated by Russia until it suddenly sent in its troops in January of last year resulting in a war in which up to 40,000 civilians may have been killed.