Matviyenko, the presidential envoy to the Northwest Region, needed more than 50 percent of votes to win outright.

She now faces second-placed Anna Markova, vice governor of the city, who had received 15.89 percent of votes after 99.53 percent of polling stations had returned their results.

The second round is scheduled for Oct. 5.

Third place went to "against all candidates," with 10.97 percent.

Nine candidates took part in the election, which recorded a low turnout of 28.99 percent, about two thirds of the turnout in the 2000 gubernatorial elections.

The next best polling candidates were Sergei Belyayev, former head of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, with 8.1 percent, Mikhail Amosov, head of the Yabloko faction in the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, with 7.06 percent, and Legislative Assembly member Konstantin Sukhenko, with 5.13 percent. Other candidates got less then 1 percent of votes cast.

Markova said Monday she and most candidates who recieved a significant number of votes, such as Sukhenko and Amosov, would form a coalition to defeat Matviyenko.

Financing this campaign is in doubt because her funds are exhausted, she added.

"In the face of all the resources the candidate No. 1 had, we have done what seemed to be impossible ... I have zero money left in my account," Markova said at an impromptu briefing at the City Election Commission headquarters early Monday morning.

"After the draft results were announced and it became clear we're going to face a second round, I shook hands with Sukhenko. Then I warily shook hands with Amosov [a bitter critic of City Hall] ... and we couldn't stop shaking hands," Markova said.

Matviyenko did not comment on the results on Sunday night, nor did she show up at any of three media centers during the night.

"In the conditions we've been working in, we were ready for such a development," Matviyenko said at a news conference on Monday afternoon, referring to a second round.

"We didn't fall into confusion, but reviewed the situation in a real and philosophical way. It would be a good result to get 50 percent when nine candidates are competing," she said.

She added that up to 2 million copies of "false and compromising materials" in relation to her or her relatives "had been taken daily from the city."

"All the candidates worked against me," she said. "They didn't talk about their programs, but just worked against me. If we had used administrative resources, it would have been not that hard to make the missing 1.4 percent to win. We did not do it."

Matviyenko said she had had a telephone conversation with President Vladimir Putin on Monday morning. He was pleased with the results, she said.

Matviyenko emphasized that she would not be pursuing any coalition with other candidates to persuade their voters to vote for her.

"I am a tolerant person by nature, but don't take any ultimatums. I won't negotiate any conditions, but I am ready for negotiations if no conditions are imposed ... [Alexei] Timofeyev and [Oleg] Titov have congratulated me. They are our future young politicians," she said.

Timofeyev and Titov gained 0.87 percent and 0.74 percent of votes cast, respectively.

According to local election law, if a vote against all the candidates is higher then a vote for either of the two candidates in the second round, the elections are considered invalid. If that happens, the next elections should take place within a year while an acting governor, appointed by a previous governor, runs City Hall.

Governor Vladimir Yakovlev appointed his deputy Alexander Beglov to head City Hall after he left St. Petersburg on June 16 to work as deputy prime minister responsible for municipal housing services.

Whether a second round would be held was still in the balance on Sunday evening.

The Agency for Social Research announced results of exit polls conducted among 5,000 voters from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in most of the polling stations around the city. While the election commission reported an extremely low turnout of about 20 percent by the afternoon, Matviyenko was getting just slightly more then 50 percent, with a margin of error of 1.5 percent.

"The weather is good," Nikolai Konkin, spokesman for the Central Election Commission, said Sunday.

"The difference is that the last gubernatorial elections took place in May, but now it is September, the time when people harvest what they planted in the spring," he said. "And there is less the time to conduct elections. Last time the polling stations had been working until 10:00 p.m. Now it is until 8:00 p.m. only," he said.

"In the morning all these pensioners and people with Soviet mentality went to vote. They are very disciplined and they like the authorities," Leonid Kesselman, a political analyst at the sociology department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said Sunday.

"The fact that the weather is good - mushroom picking, and so on - and the belief that everything has been decided for the city in advance played its role for the low turn out," he said.

Tatyana Protasenko, a senior researcher for Sociology Department at the Russian Academy of Sciences, said it was very difficult to conduct exit polls on the gubernatorial elections.

"This time many people refused to tell us who they voted for. This is unusual. We suspect that this is because people felt embarrassed to say they voted for Matviyenko," Protasenko said.

Konkin said there had been almost no serous violations registered, except that six people conducting exit polls for the Agency for Social Research were detained by police at a polling station on Moskovsky Prospect because the officers mistakenly thought they were breaking election law.

"It is quite typical that our law enforcers don't know the law," he said.

According to the police, quoted by Interfax on Sunday, the surveyors had been working at a distance of less then 50 meters from polling stations, which is prohibited by election law, but the sociologists said they know the law and did not break it. The police also said they detained two people trying to bribe voters by one of the polling station.

Roman Mogilevsky, head of the Agency for Social Research, said police told him they had had no instructions about permitting pollsters to conduct exit polls.

"We can conduct surveys without having a license, and we don't have to inform any authorities about it. We informed the city election commission just in case," Mogilevsky said Sunday at a briefing.

"I told one major that it might be easier to just arrest everybody in the city to solve all the problems and he replied they have enough cells to do so. We were both joking, but I'd say that these things are not really funny," he said.

The pollsters were released shortly after information about the police breaking the law was spread around the city by information agencies and television.

City Prosecutor Nikolai Vinnichenko said police had prevented ballots from being stolen by voters in the Central and Primorsky districts.

"Some citizens came to a polling station under the influence of alcohol," Interfax quoted him saying Sunday.

The city Prosecutor's Office opened five criminal cases in relation to the election campaign for lying and attempts to bribe voters.

Meanwhile, Markova branded the elections a parody, saying that Vinnichenko had said there were few violations, but that candidates' headquarters had sent more than 5,000 complaints to the City Election Commission. Observers from her headquarters were allowed into the polling stations only after 6p.m., two hours before the voting was finished.

But Tatyana Dorutina, of the St. Petersburg League of Voters, said the elections showed authorities can break the law whenever they want to. She cited the support Putin had shown for Matviyenko that was screened on federal television channels 2 1/2 weeks before the elections.

"This was allowed to be done by the president. Putin has signed the law himself and had broke it himself," Dorutina said in a telephone interview Sunday.

"There were more than enough of law violations during this campaign. We have filed two complaints to the City Election Commission against two candidates, Belyayev and Matviyenko. Belyayev was using a sexist advertisement, and [Vadim] Tyulpanov [the speaker of the Legislative Assembly] called for the public to support Matviyenko," she said, "We haven't received any answer and it's understandable. If Putin breaks the law what would anybody say about some Tyulpanov."

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Gubernatorial Elections in St. Petersburg 2003

The St.Petersburg Times, September 23, 2003