Pskov

By Denis Pinchuk

ST PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) - Regional polls in Russia next Sunday may be a blueprint for nationwide elections in the coming 18 months. If they are, the Kremlin's harshest critics will be watching the national votes from the sidelines.

The March 11 elections for local legislatures in 14 of Russia's nearly 90 regions have seen an unusually high number of parties -- most of them Kremlin critics -- barred from taking part on technical grounds.

Those left out accuse the Kremlin of trying to purge Russian politics of its most awkward opponents in preparation for a parliamentary vote in December and, most importantly, a presidential poll in 2008.

President Vladimir Putin is to step down after that vote and analysts say Kremlin political managers want no surprises as they try to engineer a smooth handover of power to a favoured successor, whom Putin has yet to name.

In Russia's second city of St Petersburg, local observers said the liberal Yabloko party was set to win between five and 10 percent of the vote before election officials disqualified it on a technicality.

"All independent players in (the Kremlin's political) system must be destroyed and Yabloko is one of the those independent forces which is not controlled by the Kremlin," Mikhail Amosov, a senior Yabloko official in the city, told Reuters.

He said the Kremlin plan was to mould a new system dominated by United Russia and Fair Russia, two faithfully pro-Kremlin parties that never criticise the president.

The parties that have been disqualified from the regional votes do not have strong nationwide support in a country where most voters back Putin and his allies.

Nevertheless, their exclusion at the beginning of a vital election cycle has revived worries over whether Putin is really committed to a democratic handover of power.

"Much that will take place this December in the Duma (parliamentary) elections and in the presidential elections is taking place at the moment in St Petersburg," analyst Stanislav Belkovsky told the Ekho St Petersburg radio station.

FAIR ELECTIONS?

A spokesman for the Kremlin declined to comment on the regional elections. Putin has though, said in the past that Russian elections are free and fair.

Election officials deny any political motive and say the parties were disqualified because they failed to comply with election rules.

Yabloko's exclusion has provoked a storm of outrage in St Petersburg, Putin's hometown which is also a stronghold for the small but vocal liberal opposition.

Yabloko's problems began when the party submitted petitions showing support for its participation in the vote.

The city's election commission said the proportion of invalid signatures was over the threshold of 10 percent. An appeal was rejected.

Elsewhere, the Communist Party was denied registration in the Caucasus region of Dagestan and the Siberian region of Tyumen but managed to overturn the decisions.

The pro-business Union of Right Forces overturned a decision to bar it from elections in Samara but was refused registration in the Vologda, Pskov, Dagestan and Tyumen regions.

New, more demanding election rules adopted by the pro-Kremlin majority in Russia's parliament are part of the reason for the problems.

Parties with fewer than 50,000 members are barred and anyone wanting to take part in an election has to submit a large bond or thousands of signatures -- all rules which smaller opposition groups say discriminate against them.

Supporters of the new rules say they were needed to weed out "one-day parties" and encourage the emergence of durable political groups that will bring stability.

The victims of the new rules disagree.

"They allow the Kremlin to make a selection: who can take part in the country's political life and who can't," said Vladimir Ryzhkov, whose opposition Republican Party has been ordered to close because it does not meet the membership rules.

(Additional reporting by Guy Faulconbridge, Oleg Shchedrov and Christian Lowe in Moscow)

(c) Reuters 2007. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world.

# @ 3:50 AM