RUSSIA'S election campaign has been further beset by violence with the murders of Mr Viktor Mosalov, the mayor of the town of Zhukovsky near Moscow and the leader of the ultra nationalist Liberal Democratic Party in the Siberian town of Novokuznetsk.
And reports from Grozny said that the peace talks in the Chechen war were on the brink of collapse.
Mr Mosalov was found dead with two bullet wounds in the head outside his apartment yesterday morning in the town of 100,000 just 20 km from Moscow which houses Russia's major air show every two years.
In yesterday's second killing, Mr Vladimir Oberderfer was shot several times in the head while carrying out political duties.
However, the Interfax news agency said Mr Oberderfer - the local leader of Mr Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party - was killed while buying cigarettes and was known by law and order forces as the leader of a criminal group and not for his political activities.
Last weekend, the deputy mayor of Moscow, Mr Valery Shantsev, survived a bomb attack at his home but was seriously injured. Earlier this month, the governor of Moscow's Saltykova region was also murdered, while on Tuesday night a bomb in the Moscow metro killed four people and seriously injured 12 others.
President Yeltsin campaigning in St Petersburg yesterday condemned the first murder as the latest in series of terrorist acts aimed at intimidating the electorate on the eve of Sunday's vote and issued an appeal for calm to the public.
"Calmness and safety remain the main aim of the President of Russia," he said, adding that there were "forces interested in breaking the fragile public accord of the country."
Mr Yeltsin, however, refused to intervene to break a deadlock which threatens to wreck the peace talks which are continuing in the rebel region of Chechnya in the Caucasus.
The pro Moscow Chechen administration is going ahead with plans to hold local elections in the region on Sunday but the rebel leader, Mr Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, has responded by saying that his armed forces would respond with "every means possible" to prevent the polling from taking place.
Mr Yeltsin's reaction yesterday was simply to say that the matter was out of his hands and the pro Moscow authorities had the constitutional right to go ahead with the elections if they wanted to.
A return to full scale hostilities would come too late to harm Mr Yeltsin's chances in Sunday's first round of voting but if, as expected, he is forced into a second round of voting in a month's time a renewal of the war could damage the second part of his campaign considerably.
The final opinion polls issued yesterday gave Mr Yeltsin a 10 joint lead over Mr Zyuganov but well short of the 50 per cent needed to gain immediate victory. Russian polls have been hopelessly inaccurate in the past and are little trusted by political analysts here.
Mr Yeltsin says he is confident of a first round victory. "Either that will be the case or I don't know my people."
The independent Carnegie Institute, however, believes that not only will Mr Yeltsin have to wait until the second round for victory but Mr Zyuganov is likely to head the poll on Sunday.
In the campaign yesterday, Mr Zyuganov's team swung into the attack on the election promises made by Mr Yeltsin in the course of the campaign and which have worried western financial institutions and the IMF who fear a rise in inflation if they are implemented.
Already, the independence of the Russian Central bank has been called into question following moves by the Yeltsin administration to sequester part of its reserves to fund the promises made in the election campaign.
In a TV advertisement yesterday, the movie director, Mr Stanislav Govorukhin, who supports Mr Zyuganov, lambasted Mr Yeltsin's spending on his election campaign while workers in many industries had not been paid for months. Another candidate, Mr Vladimir Bryntsalov, an eccentric millionaire who tells Russians he became rich by robbing them, also attacked the spending spree.
But a leading adviser to Mr Yeltsin, Mr Alexander Livshits, said the movement of $1 billion of central bank funds was a "once off transfer".
