Next Sunday, 109 million Russian voters will go to polls to elect the nation's new leader. While acting President Vladimir Putin’s success appears totally assured, the only questions seem to be about his margin of victory and how he will rule the nation of 147 million.

In the presence of 10 other contenders, Putin has been the hands-down favorite of the presidential race ever since this year’s early elections were announced following Boris Yeltsin’s surprise resignation on Dec.31, 1999.

These days, Russian observers seem to be mostly preoccupied with the question of whether Putin will be able to garner a 50-percent majority in the first round of voting or there will be a run-off needed later this spring.

Recent opinion polls shows that Putin has at least a 50-percent support base in the March 26 first round, which is far ahead of his nearest rival. Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov is predicted to receive 15 to 20 percent of the vote and liberal economist Grigoriy Yavlinsky is likely to garner support of 5 to 8 percent of Russian electorate.

The 11 candidates in Russia's presidential election are:

• Acting President Vladimir Putin
• Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov
• Governor of the Kemerovo region Aman Tuleev
• Governor of the Samara region Konstantin Titov
• Head of the liberal Yabloko party Grigoriy Yavlinsky
• Businessman Umar Dzhabrailov
• Former assistant to Zyuganov Alexei Podberezkin
• Film director and senior Duma deputy from the centrist Fatherland-All Russia party Stanislav Govorukhin
• Former chief prosecutor Yuri Skuratov
• Nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky
• Head of a small centrist group and the first woman to run for the Russian presidency Ella Pamfilova

(Only three of the candidates took part in the previous presidential election. Zyuganov, Yavlinsky and Zhirinovsky were respectively second, fourth and fifth in the previous presidential elections held in 1996.)

Of the 10 contenders (except Putin) five contestants can be described as holding nationalist views -- Zyuganov, Tuleev, Podberezkin, Govorukhin and Zhirinovsky. Two -- Titov and Yavlinsky, are prominent members of the liberal movement who made free economics and human rights issues the core of their programs. The rest of the contenders are marginal figures who are expected to receive less than one percent of the vote each.

(Neo-Nazi leader Alexander Barkashov who joined the race earlier this year was disqualified in February when the Central Election Commission found some minor technical breaches in his campaign. It is similar to the situation with the Spas Party, also headed by Barkashov, that following a major media campaign was not allowed to run in the December 1999 Duma election when Barkashov was excluded from the race also on technical grounds.)

A total lack of suspense over the outcome of the vote has turned the campaigns of all major candidates into an almost useless effort and has led to apathy on the part of many candidates.

Yet, amidst this year's lackluster election race, the campaigns of several candidates did resort to nationalist rhetoric which went almost unnoticed by majority of voters and most of the media outlets.

The use of ultranationalism in election propaganda was part and parcel of the campaigns of two leading politicians that have long been known for their anti-Semitic, xenophobic and anti-Western views, Gennady Zyuganov and Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

In this campaign, Zhirinovsky who seemed to be an extremist character in previous election campaigns (1991 and 1996) appears to be much more moderate in his orientation and is not seen this year as representing the extreme opposition. Zhirinovsky who has shown himself in recent years to be a loyal supporter of the Kremlin, announced his presidential bid in order to keep his image of a controversial political fighter. However, he has no chances, analysts agree, to win a significant portion of the vote.

In an obvious bid to preserve his controversial image, Zhirinovsky said in an interview earlier this month that he saw himself playing an equivalent role to Austria's Jorg Haider in Russia if he lost the presidential election.

The left opposition -- represented in the race by Zyuganov and a couple of other candidates, is well aware that it has little chances of winning. Yet with its stable electoral base of 20 to 30 percent, Communists do not want to lose their face in the eyes of their voters.

Although he refers to the might of Russia when it was the leading power in the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc, Zyuganov's appeal is more to Russian's nationalism, summed up in one of his slogans, "For the victory of Russian patriots!"

This year, the Communists, whose campaigns over the last decade have always included ultranationalism and Russian chauvinism, again strongly peppered their election propaganda with xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Most of Zyuganov’s nationalism is targeted against wealthy and politically influential entrepreneurs usually referred to as "the oligarchs," some of whom are known to be of Jewish extraction. Similar to other opposition politicians, the Communist leader routinely lashes out at the oligarchs as the new exploiters of Russia and a "fifth column" in Russian society, disloyal to Russia, and whose "anti-Russian" activities have been directed from abroad.

In a major political statement outlining his election program and published in January, Zyuganov made some thinly veiled anti-Semitic remarks. In an interview with Russia's two leading opposition newspapers, Sovyetskaya Rossiya and Zavtra, Gennady Zyuganov described results of Yeltsin’s presidency, saying that Yeltsin left an exhausted, crime-, poverty- and chaos-stricken country, which over the years of his rule lost 8 million people.

Speaking about the root of Russian problems Zyuganov said that the country is being "looted" by "a small group of treacherous bourgeois, oligarchs insatiable in their greed" who act "in the interest of the U.S.A. and Israel."

On several occasions, Zyuganov also spoke against the proposed legislation which "blockade national self-consciousness of the Russian and other peoples that is being done under the false slogans of fighting Russian fascism." Zyuganov referred to proposed hate crime legislation, which was blocked by the left majority in the previous Duma, lower house of Parliament. The draft law "On Political Extremism" was proposed by liberal lawmakers to bolster the Russian Criminal Code-based efforts to confront ultranationalism, neo-Nazism and anti-Semitic extremism.

During this year’s campaign, perhaps to a greater extent than ever before, Zyuganov's nationalist rhetoric attracted representatives of many major ultranationalist groups that called on their supporters to back the Communist leader on March 26. (One notable exception here is Russian National Unity that urged voters on the eve of the election to vote against all candidates – an option that exists on Russian election ballots.)

In one such example, Zyuganov's meeting with voters in southern Russia's city of Krasnodar last week was dominated by members of neo-Nazi Russian National Unity organizations and various Cossack groups known for their xenophobia and anti-Semitism.

Regardless of the outcome of the March 26 vote, this year's presidential campaign has been used by ultranationalists of all shades to spread nationalist, anti-Semitic and anti-Western sentiments.

The experience of previous election campaigns already showed that ultranationalist and xenophobic propaganda is becoming especially active before the elections regardless of prospects for success for opposition candidates in the race.

(In one recent example, a group of neo-Nazi skinheads rallied in downtown Moscow with the formal goal to show support for the presidential bid of moderate nationalist candidate Alexei Podberezkin who is not likely to get more than two percent of the vote. In fact, a few dozen of the participants of the rally on March 23 chanted anti-Semitic slogans and called on the crowd to beat Jews and dark-skinned people from the Caucasus.)

One could have noticed this change in the language and content of leading opposition newspapers, such as Zavtra and Sovyetskya Rossiya, which took place over the past two months.

(For example, in a recent front page article, Zavtra, a Moscow ultranationalist weekly newspaper which has an ongoing interest in various conspiracy theories, alleged that Yeltsin’s resignation and Putin’s rise to power had come as a result of the thoroughly conceived plot carried out by Russia’s leading pro-reform politicians of Jewish extraction, and Goldman Sachs financial group of U.S. which is "controlled by the Jewish religious capital.")

It should be also noted that xenophobic and nationalist ideas have to some extent found their way into mainstream politics. Centrist politicians, including acting President Vladimir Putin, are at times identifying themselves with the national-patriotic idea and those ideas develop in the centrist political environment under their own momentum. This is especially so given Russia's complicated economic situation and the ongoing war in Chechnya.

In these circumstances, the Jewish community and human rights watchers should continue to keep a close eye on the ongoing spread of nationalist and xenophobic propaganda following the next Sunday's vote.