With less than a week to general elections on May 17, opinion polls indicate the Russian-speakers could provide Ehud Barak of the Labor Party with the votes he needs to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- the third time the new immigrants would have helped oust an Israeli government.

But analysts warn against betting on which way the new immigrants -- referred to collectively as the Russians -- will swing come election day.

``The Russian vote will determine who will be Israel's next premier, but no one really knows how they will vote,'' Barry Rubin, a political analyst at Bar Illan university, said.

``Russians don't believe in polls and they don't like to tell the pollsters who they really plan to vote for, it's the result of years of communism,'' Rubin said. Nearly amillion people have immigrated to Israel from the ex-Soviet republics, most since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989. Russian-speakers now make up nearly 15 percent of the electorate.

In the previous two polls, Russian voters frustrated with unemployment, housing and discrimination voted massively against incumbents regardless of ideological considerations. In 1992, the Russians sent the late Labor Party leader Yitzhak Rabin to victory over the right-wing Likud government of Yitzhak Shamir. They then swung rightward in 1996 to give Netanyahu his suprise victory over Rabin's successor, Shimon Peres.

That election also saw the rise of Israel B'Aliya, or the Israel Home for Immigration party, and its leader Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident who has since been Netanyahu's trade and industry minister.

Considered nationalists by tradition, the Russian immigrants identified with Netanyahu's tough stance in peace negotiations with the Palestinians. But other Russian aspirations went unmet and thewily Sharansky has so far refrained from endorsing his boss for re-election.

The result was a frantic courtship of the Russian vote by all sides.Every major party has made sure its television campaign ads come with Russian subtitles -- some were even in Russian with Hebrew subtitles -- while Barak and Netanyahu have appeared on Russian-language television shows and sought to woo readers O F Russian-language newspapers.

Barak has made major gains among the Russians with a campaign focussed on economic issues and his past as the army's chief and most decorated war hero -- a strong-man image that appeals to the immigrants and counters Netanyahu's claims to be Israel's ``Mr. Security''.

Barak also rocked existing alliances by hinting that if elected he would put Sharansky in charge of the interior ministry, the immigration watchdog now controlled by the ultra-Orthodox Jewish party Shas, a key Netanyahu ally.

Israel B'Aliya complains that under Shas the interior ministry has hindered theentry andabsorption of Russian immigrants, many of whom oenly flout Jewish religious laws. Interior Minister Eli Suissa countered in a television campaign ad last week that Israel B'Aliya wanted to take over his portfolio to allow ``forgers, cheats, call-girls and priests'' into the country.

The remark enraged Russians and forced Netanyahu to drag Suissa before the television cameras to apologise to Sharansky.