The election cycle never stops. In Amur, the incumbent governor lost despite Kremlin backing. The Kremlin’s representative in the region blamed the loss on slander and campaign sabotage. In Tula, the incumbent governor, a hard-line communist who backed the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, easily defeated his opponents, one of whom was Leonid Brezhnev’s grandson. In Evenk, a district in Krasnoyarsk where one-time presidential hopeful General Aleksandr Lebed is governor, the Kremlin, the Communist Party, and the Union of Right-Wing Forces joined together to back a local business manager against a Lebed ally. The businessman (Boris Zolotarev, a director of Yukos Oil) won a close race with 51 percent of the vote.