The 1997 Moscow City Duma election was held December 14 of that year to the Moscow City Duma, the city's unicameral parliament (city council). The inaugural election for municipal councils in Moscow's raions was held on the same day.
Participating in the election were 28 associations and four electoral blocs. Background In 1995, the deputies refused to schedule new elections and instead extended their term for a further two years. This provoked a two-year court case that ended in the summer of 1997 with a ruling that the Duma had acted illegally in extending its powers.
Campaign The "Nikolai Gonchar" bloc was the only bloc that adopted a platform critical of the way Mayor Yury Luzhkov ran the city. Among posters were "In this city, there should be a separation of powers, but the present Moscow City Duma is nothing but a pie with no filling".Russkii telegraf, October 7, 1997 The bloc, which was set up by the "Our City" movement, the Moscow Association of Councils of Territorial and Social Self-Government, and the Moscow branch of the Democratic Party of Russia, included 33 candidates. The "My Moscow" bloc (CPRF, APR, ROS, Spiritual Heritage and People's Alliance) campaign stressed that "Muscovites support the Mayor's actions" and focused on solving the city's ecological and transportation problems.
Some days before the voting the city hall-owned newspaper Tverskaya 13 published a list of 35 candidates that were endorsed by the mayor. They won in all but 9 districts. The "Luzhkov list" had a partial overlap with a joint "democratic majority" list backed by NDR, DVR and Yabloko parties.
A total of 357 candidates ran in the election, of them 225 unaffiliated, 28 members of the outgoing City Duma and 59 women.
Results
+Elected deputies by district District Winner 1st Sergey Goncharov (inc.) 2nd Mikhail Moskvin-Tarkhanov (inc.) 3rd Nikolay Moskovchenko (inc.) 4th Igor Antonov 5th Sergey Osadchy (inc.) 6th Irina Rukina (inc.) 7th Galina Khovanskaya (inc.) 8th Vladimir Vasilyev 9th Yury Sharandin 10th Ivan Novitsky (inc.) 11th Aleksandr Krutov (inc.) 12th Valentina Prisyazhnyuk (inc.) 13th Vitaly Kovalevsky (inc.) 14th Irina Osokina 15th Oleg Muzyrya 16th Sergey Loktionov 17th Lyudmila Stebenkova (inc.) 18th Gennady Lobok 19th Igor Lisinenko 20th Andrey Voykov 21st Stepan Orlov 22nd Yevgeny Balashov (inc.) 23rd Viktor Dvurechenskikh 24th Oleg Bocharov 25th Dmitry Katayev (inc.) 26th Mikhail Vyshegorodtsev 27th Andrey Shirokov 28th Vladimir Plotnikov (inc.) 29th Vladimir Platonov (inc.) 30th Alevtina Nikitina (inc.) 31st Yury Zagrebnoy 32nd Yevgeny Bunimovich 33rd Vladimir Katushenok (inc.) 34th Konstantin Solovyov 35th Zinaida Dragunkina
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