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MOSCOW : A bomb blast Saturday in Russia's volatile south that killed a 94-year-old World War II soldier cast a shadow over nationwide May Day celebrations led by Communists, many of them war veterans.
President Dmitry Medvedev moved quickly to order a federal probe into the blast that left another 22 people injured in the North Caucasus region of Kabardino Balkaria, where the Kremlin is battling a tenacious Islamist insurgency.
The explosive device rigged to a timer was set off around 12.15 pm (0815 GMT) above the VIP box at a hippodrome in the regional capital Nalchik, a spokeswoman for the local investigative committee told AFP.
"During a horse race... on the occasion of the celebrations an explosion went off in the VIP lodge of a magnitude equivalent of 3-4 kilograms of TNT," the spokeswoman, Tatiana Nauzhokova, said.
"One man has died in hospital from his injuries," she said.
Russian news agencies said the victim who died in hospital, Saidly Shibzukhov, was a 94-year-old veteran of World War II, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War.
A list of 23 people wounded in the blast including Shibzukhov, whose date of birth is listed in 1916, was released on the emergency services' website.
The attack came as tens of thousands of diehard Communists, mostly pensioners with red flags and pictures of wartime leader Joseph Stalin, led May Day marches Saturday in a throw-back to Soviet-era parades across the ex-USSR.
Their ranks were swelled by nationalists and trade union supporters of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's ruling party, who drew more than 20,000 people to their own rally in Moscow.
According to Russian media, some 1.7 million people nationwide were to take part in the demonstrations begun earlier in Russia's Pacific Coast port city of Vladivostok and due to sweep west to the Baltic Sea enclave of Kaliningrad.
For Russia's Communist Party, whose leaders avoid fierce criticism of Putin or Medvedev, May Day harks back to the cherished International Worker's Day celebrations under the Soviet Union.
The rallies were also closely tied to nostalgia for the Soviet victory over Nazi German as Russia readies to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the end of the World War II on May 9.
At marches in Russia's second city of Saint Petersburg, birthplace of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, participants bemoaned the economic crisis and called for a return to better days under communism.
Demonstrators brandished banners that read "Workers should not pay for the crisis" and "No to price hikes!"
While the Communists are now in "soft" opposition as the second largest party in Russia's docile parliament, the beleaguered non-parliamentary opposition groups held separate "Day of Anger" protests.
Some 3,000 demonstrators from rights groups and the opposition Solidarity movement protested against Putin in a Moscow rally held without incident but closely watched by police.
In the wake of the explosion, Medvedev ordered security boosted and a federal probe launched into the blast, a Kremlin spokesman told AFP, while regional leader Arsen Kanokov denounced the attack as a bid by Islamist rebels to destabilized the region.
"This is an attempt to destabilize the situation in Kabardino Balkaria and the North Caucasus. They will not be successful. Those who perpetrated this crime do not have the people's support," Kanokov said, quoted by Interfax.
Kabardino-Balkaria, a predominantly Muslim region in the North Caucasus, has experienced only occasional militant attacks in recent years and mostly avoided the large-scale violence of nearby Chechnya or Dagestan.
But violence has spiked in recent months. On Friday, four people including two police officers were injured in a bomb blast in Nalchik. - AFP/fa
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