Russians miss strong Soviet leaders, poll finds
MOSCOW, Sept 12 (Reuters) - Late Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov would have better chances than any living politician to become Russia's next president if they could run in elections, a poll published on Sunday showed.
Commercial NTV television presented results of a survey by the respectable Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), in which Russians were asked who among living or dead politicians and state leaders they would want as president.
The poll showed Brezhnev and Andropov would get 12 percent of votes if such an election could be held this weekend.
Many Russians are disillusioned by botched economic reforms, rampant mafia criminality and the fraying of cradle-to-grave job and social security since the 1991 collapse of Communist rule.
Former Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, so far seen as the strongest candidate who could run in the presidential polls next year, would come third with only 10 percent.
Brezhnev, Communist leader of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982, is associated in the minds of many Russians with a long period of stability that followed years of purges by dictator Joseph Stalin and hectic reforms by Nikita Khrushchev.
The short 1982-84 rule of Andropov, a former head of the KGB secret police, is most remembered for his attempt to restore tough discipline in a Communist empire poisoned by corruption and already touched by general decay.
``They (Brezhnev and Andropov) are better known to ... ordinary people (who) compare what they have today with the stability and grandeur of the Soviet Union under their rule,'' Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said, commenting on the poll.
``I think serious conclusions should be made by those who are in power today and even more by those who prepare to run for power in future,'' Luzhkov, who has presidential ambitions himself, told NTV.
The poll, which targeted 1,500 people in 52 Russian regions on September 4-5, gave current Russian Communist opposition leader Gennady Zyuganov a seven percent rating, equal to Stalin.
Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet state and an object of orchestrated admiration through seven decades of Communist rule, came last in the ratings at just three percent, half of what Luzhkov could hope for.