Time to
Inspect
Russian Roulette
There's no lock on the immigrants as a coveted
voting block in the May elections.
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LARRY DERFNER ISRAEL CORRESPONDENT
S
ince shortly after the 1992
election, in which a major-
ity of Russian immigrant
voters gave their support
to the Labor Party, the conven-
tional wisdom has been that the
Russians had massively
switched allegiances. But the
popular thinking leading up to
the May 29 elections has the vast
majority of them voting for
Likud's Binyamin Netanyahu as
prime minister.
Yet, that sentiment may be
quite off the mark. Dr. Aharon
Fein, director of the Tatzpit pub-
lic opinion survey agency, has
done more opinion polling of the
Russians than anyone else. The
immigrants, he-has found, seem
split evenly between Mr. Ne-
tanyahu and Prime Minister
Shimon Peres.
"They're not sure that Ne-
tanyahu is such a bargain," Dr.
Fein says.
A Likud source close to Mr.
Netanyahu says a recent, inde-
pendent poll of Russian immi-
grants showed the same results
Dr. Fein has been getting. This
was a surprise, the source said,
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made by Labor and Welfare Min-
ister Ora Namir, who said many
immigrants were not Zionists,
but opportunists. Also, Labor
Health Minister Ephraim Sneh
has said that many immigrant
families were problem cases.
Taken with the Russians'
hawkish foreign affairs tenden-
cies (a byproduct of life in the for-
mer Soviet Union), their
anti-establishment bent, their
enthusiasm for free-market eco-
nomics and hatred for anything
that smacked of socialism, this
seemed to augur a huge turnout
for Mr. Netanyahu.
And with some 400,000 Russ-
ian immigrants eligible to vote
on May 29 — about 12 percent
of the total electorate — their
support for Mr. Netanyahu ap-
peared a daunting force.
But in the last couple of years,
the Russians also have become
the greatest success story in the
history of Israeli immigration. If,
on the eve of the 1992 election,
the stereotypical Russian immi-
grant was the doctor from
Moscow reduced to sweeping
streets, today's image is of the
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adding that he had no explana-
tion for it.
When the Russians went for
Labor in 1992, about one-third
of them were unemployed, with
most of the rest working menial
jobs; many thousands were liv-
ing in trailer parks. They blamed
their condition on Likud and
then-Prime Minister Shamir.
Yitzhak Rabin and Labor were
the beneficiaries of their bitter-
ness.
In the years after the election,
nearly all the Russians found
jobs and all but a few found
apartments. But their jobs, they
now say, are not commensurate
with their talents. Beyond this,
they are outraged at comments
small-scale entrepreneur and en-
thusiastic consumer. Thus, the
immigrants' growing prosperity
appears to be pushing many of
them in Mr. Peres' direction.
"When we came here the
Likud was in power, and after
Labor took over we saw that a
lot of good things were happen-
ing. The government started a
lot of [job-training] courses for
immigrants, and a lot of people
succeeded," said Anna Liport, 38,
a hospital employee in Bat Yam
who emigrated from Russia in
1990.
"I think we have to give Peres
a chance to continue [the eco-
nomic advances for immigrants]
that the government started. If