A familiar face has reappeared on the streets of Moscow. It is that of a swarthy gentleman with a big black moustache. His picture began to appear on posters on a few lamp-posts around Moscow towards the end of the election campaign. There was a time when his picture was everywhere and his name instilled fear throughout the land.

The party, called Stalin's Bloc for the USSR, is unlikely to emerge as a major winner in tomorrow's elections for Russia's new parliament, but it won't finish last, and if the vote were confined to Russian grandmothers, the eternal babushki of Russia, it might stand a chance of victory.

Stalin's Bloc is led by Viktor Anpilov, the self-appointed and entirely ineffective scourge of capitalism since its arrival in Russia in 1992.

Stanislav Terekhov, of the Union of Russian Officers, is the second candidate on the party's list, and coming in at No 3, to add a genuine Stalinist touch, is none other than Yevgeny Djugashvili, grandson of Josef Stalin.

This party is one of quite a few odd groups running for office, some of them under inappropriate banners.

In the country which spawned an ultra-right-wing party called the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, under the madcap Vladimir Zhirinovsky, it is hardly surprising that the Russian Socialist Party represents unfettered entrepreneurship.

The "socialists" are led by a pharmaceutical billionaire, Vladimir Bryntsalov, whose wife helped him out in the campaign for the presidency in 1996 by posing for the cameras in a micro-mini-skirt and thigh-length leather boots. On that occasion, Bryntsalov spent a fortune and finished last.

There are serious politicians, too, some of them so serious that they haven't even bothered to campaign and have, fortunately for most voters, kept their policies to themselves.

But there is an intense battle for the votes of more than 100 million Russians from parties which want to gain or retain a grip on power in a country so large that it calls itself, unofficially, the "Seventh Continent".

It can be described as a three-way struggle, although there are more than three parties involved. President Yeltsin's entourage, known as "the Family", is opposed by the Communists on the one hand and a newly-formed non-communist group called Fatherland-All Russia or OVR in its Russian initials.

The "Family" is supported by the Unity party, under the Emergencies Minister, Sergei Shoigu; the Union of Right-Wing Forces, (PD) under a former prime minister, Sergei Kiriyenko; and Our Home is Russia (NDR), founded by another former premier, Viktor Chernomyrdin.

Polls in Russia are notoriously unreliable, but the indications are that the war in Chechnya is boosting the "family" parties, which had until then been struggling under allegations of massive corruption.

Another key factor has been a Soviet-style propaganda campaign by the main TV network, ORT, aimed at discrediting OVR and its leaders, Yevgeny Primakov, yet another former prime minister, and the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov.

The campaign, led by an anchor man, Sergei Dorenko, has been crude but effective. Mr Luzhkov, a city boss in the old Mayor Daley style, is no angel. Dorenko's programme has thrown the book at him, including an accusation that he ordered the murder of an American businessman, Paul Tatum, who was greeted by a hail of machinegun bullets at the Kievskaya metro station in November 1996.

Mr Primakov has been depicted as an elderly man in bad health. He recently had a hip replacement, so Dorenko showed a video of this type of operation in all its gory detail and asked Russians if a man who had gone through this was fit enough to be president. Mr Yeltsin, who is supported by Dorenko, had a quintuple heart by-pass in 1996.

The independent NTV channel has been more even-handed, but its coverage is restricted to areas mainly in European Russia and the public gets most of its information from ORT.

Another feature of the campaign has been the number of shady members of the "family" who have decided to run for office and consequent immunity from prosecution.

Boris Berezovsky, the billionaire supporter of Mr Yeltsin, known as a latter-day Rasputin, has chosen to stand in the remote constituency of Karachayevo Cherkessia in the northern Caucasus. Mr Berezovsky is under investigation for corruption in Switzerland.

A former business associate of Berezovsky's, Boris Abramovich, an oil magnate and close friend and financial supporter of the Yeltsin family, has chosen to contest an even more remote constituency.

With the help of a right-wing TV personality, Alexander Nevzorov, a supporter of the Soviet Union's repression in the Baltics, Abramovich is running in Chukhotka. This vast wasteland, opposite Alaska, is thinly populated with voters and, more importantly, is out of the way of curious reporters. Abramovich is such a recluse that one newspaper recently offered a reward to anyone who could supply his photograph.

Pavel Borodin, who runs the Kremlin administration, was under investigation in Russia for corruption and is still under investigation in Switzerland. The Russian investigation came to an abrupt end when Mr Yeltsin sacked the prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov.

A video of a man who looks like Skuratov romping in bed with two prostitutes has been a feature of Dorenko's TV programme in the build-up to the elections. Borodin is standing for mayor of Moscow against Mr Luzhkov in an election held simultaneously with the Duma vote.

Against this background, the campaign of Yabloko, the main liberal party under an economist, Grigory Yavlinsky, is tame in the extreme. Accused by Zhirinovsky of being "a pawn of the American imperialists", Yavlinsky surprised most observers by teaming up with Sergei Stepashin, yet another former prime minister.

Stepashin was an unbending supporter of the Chechen war of 1994-1996, and Yavlinsky was its strongest opponent. Stepashin was part of a Yeltsin administration which Yavlinsky vigorously opposed.

This may puzzle the voters but Yabloko should manage to get past the 5 per cent barrier needed for representation among the 225 seats elected from the party list system. The other half of the Duma is elected through single-mandate constituencies on the first-past-the-post system.

It looks as though anything could happen in the single-seaters. An opinion poll in Izvestia showed that 36 per cent did not know the name of any candidate in their constituency, 43 per cent "knew something", and the remainder had a clear picture of who was standing.