Russia Communists drop parliament boycott threat

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's opposition Communist Party has dropped its threat to boycott the next parliament but said on Thursday it will mount a legal challenge against what it described as widespread violations in last weekend's election.

The Communists won 57 seats in the December 2 election, the only anti-Kremlin party to secure representation in the 450-member parliament, known as the State Duma.

"We will not reject our seats in the Duma, but will continue to fight for the rights of our supporters," Vadim Solovyev, a member of the Communist Party's central committee told Reuters.

President Vladimir Putin's United Russia party will dominate the next parliament with control of 315 seats after winning a landslide election victory in the December 2 vote.

The results had been denounced as unfair by Western observers and some Western governments, though the Kremlin rejected the criticism as politically motivated.

Solovyev said the presidium of the Communist Party's central committee decided that "we will recognize the elections to the State Duma as fraudulent, dishonest and not free".

"We sent a complaint to the Central Election Commission (CEC) asking that the results of the election should not be recognized, and if the CEC rejects this, we will file a suit with the Supreme Court," he said.

Opposition parties and some international observers said the vote was skewed by one-sided media coverage and that Putin abused his office to campaign for his party.

The Communists alleged that there were unusually high levels of voter impersonation and other forms of ballot fraud on polling day. Russia's chief election official has said he knew of no serious violations.

Immediately after Sunday's election, the Communists said they might boycott the Duma because of what party leader Gennady Zyuganov described as "outrageous violations".

United Russia won over 64 percent of the vote - nearly six times as much as the Communists, who had 11.6 percent of the vote. Only two other parties qualified for seats in the next parliament and both back the Kremlin.

(Reporting by Aydar Buribaev; writing by Conor Sweeney; editing by Sami Aboudi)