By Uwe Klussmann, Walter Mayr and Matthias Schepp
The name Vladivostok means, "To rule the East." The picturesque city of 580,000 on Russia's hilly Pacific coast is 10 time zones from the Western edge of the Russian imperium. Vladivostok is less than 100 kilometers (62 miles) from China and almost as close to North Korea.
Vladivostok shows signs of neglect. Even Svetlanskaya, the city's main drag, is lined with sink-sized potholes and dented Soviet-era trash cans. At the yacht club, residents sip cheap beer while stray dogs roam the streets, within view of an oversized yacht anchored in the harbor. It belongs to the governor of Vladivostok Province.
Sergei Darkin, a gangly 43-year-old man, was once the shift manager at the city's harbor. He has governed the province for six years. Two years ago it became clear to Darkin that he'd done everything right. After the 2004 constitutional reform, Darkin had the honor of being the first governor in Russia to have his job reconfirmed by Putin.
Darkin is running as United Russia's top candidate in the December election. He is indisputably the man Putin expects to promote the party line in the far east. When Putin, at the last party convention in Moscow, complained about corruption as "one of Russia's biggest social and political problems," Darkin, sitting comfortably in the fourth row, smiled and joined in the applause.
As he campaigns in the small city of Mikhailovka north of Vladivostok, he doesn't stray from the Putin line on corruption. Index finger raised, he warns a group of pensioners against doing business with profiteers. He touts the virtues of stability. "Money needs quiet," says Sergei Darkin.
He knows what he's talking about. Darkin has discreetly transferred a significant portion of his stock holdings to his wife, Larissa Belobrova. With estimated assets of $48 million, Belobrova, an actress, is the second-richest woman in the province.
At the end of the Soviet era, though, Darkin was married to the daughter of a district Communist Party leader. During this time, money in the local party treasury went missing. Six days before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Darkin established an import/export company called Rolis -- a "hornet's nest of organized crime," according to a dossier on the company assembled by the Interior Ministry in Moscow.
In the 1990s Darkin emerged victorious from a struggle for control over Vladivostok's underground economy, especially the fish and automobile trade. The power struggle cost two of his rivals their lives. Sergei Baulo, the head of a local crime family, drowned while diving when an unidentified man severed his oxygen line. Another crime boss, Igor Karpov, known as the "Carp," was shot dead by a sniper in broad daylight.
The death of the Carp paved the way for Darkin, who likes to point out that he has never been convicted of a crime. As a regional oligarch, he earned the respect of the underworld and, as an added bonus, the affections of Belobrova, the murdered mafia boss's wife. They married one year after the Carp's death. When Darkin was appointed governor of the province in June 2001, he started appointing old friends from the underworld to leading positions in his administration.
Voters across the continent (click to enlarge).
Moscow isn't unaware of the situation in the coastal province. Intelligence agents -- whom Darkin would prefer to see behind bars -- have delivered a number of reports to Putin. The president himself has complained about "criminal structures" in the Far East, where the people "stop at nothing."
After long delay, though, Moscow sent investigators to the gangster stronghold on the Sea of Japan. They arrested Mayor "Winnie the Pooh," three of Darkin's deputies and the head of the regional customs office on charges of corruption. Darkin himself remained untouched.
After visiting Vladivostok in 1890, Russian author Anton Chekhov described it as a place of "poverty, vulgarity and immorality." He wrote that he had encountered "one honest person and 99 thieves."
'The Stupefaction of Young People'
The Russian public prosecutor's office estimates that the amount of money passing through the underground economy throughout Russia amounts to $240 billion, a phenomenon it claims "penetrates all levels of government." This figure is seven times as large as it was in 2001, when United Russia was established, and the number of offenses has grown by 50 percent. According to the Russian edition of Newsweek, a seat in the Duma currently sells for $3-5 million.
But United Russia seems less interested in corruption and the dictatorship of the party machine in the Russian far east than it is in defeating what Igor Chemeris, an amateur boxer and bald deputy chairman of United Russia in the Pacific region, calls the true "enemies of the Russian people."
At a recent event to mark the beginning of the election campaign in Vladivostok, Chemeris had the likenesses of a few of the men he considers enemies of the people painted onto targets. One was the Estonian prime minister. Another was Garry Kasparov, Russia's former chess champion and now a presumed presidential candidate. In line with the motto, "Vote with your guns!" the members of United Russia's youth group, the Young Guard, took turns firing colored .68 caliber ammunition at the targets.
The targets, says United Russia's second-in-command in the far east, represented an important contribution in the fight "against the stupefaction of young people."
Whether United Russia is winning that fight will become a measurable number on Sunday, after the polls in Vladivostok close.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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