Yeltsin at first bought into the idea. On the morning of March 17, he ordered his aides to draft implementing directives and law-enforcement officers to make operational plans. There were, even so, dissenting voices, and Yeltsin did not shut them out. Viktor Ilyushin, four of Yeltsin’s liberal assistants, and Sergei Shakhrai said in a memorandum that they could not write a general decree because they could come up with no legal basis for it. Were one to be written and signed, they warned, Russia could be in for a civil war.49 Anatolii Kulikov, the MVD minister who had led the ministry’s troops in Chechnya in 1994–95, rallied the procurator general, Yurii Skuratov, and the chairman of the Constitutional Court, Vladimir Tumanov, to come out against the decision as unworkable, in part because his best soldiers were still embroiled in the North Caucasus. They saw him together in his office: “The president was really and truly glum. His complexion was sallow, he was ungracious. . . . He especially disliked that we had come as a threesome.” “Minister, I am dissatisfied with you,” Yeltsin spluttered. “A decree will follow shortly. Leave and prepare to implement it.” Kulikov and two officers secured a second Kremlin meeting, at six A.M. sharp on Monday, March 18. Yeltsin was in a darker mood than the day before and would not shake hands with them; Kulikov could see on the presidential desk an unsigned decree dismissing him. Repeating that Yeltsin had no constitutional or moral case, he added that there was no evidence the army would back the president, and that the communists would go underground as martyrs for principle. “Yeltsin interrupted me and said, ‘This is my affair and not yours.’” When Kulikov hung in, Yeltsin reminded him that “you are sitting in my office” and rebuked him for speaking on others’ behalf. But the minister stuck to his guns, and Yeltsin showed signs of fickleness and allowed that the communists might have to be turned back “in stages.”50 President Clinton, alerted by Yegor Gaidar (who sent a message through Ambassador Thomas Pickering), had written Yeltsin a private letter about the need to hold the election on timetable.51 Chernomyrdin and Yurii Luzhkov of Moscow were against the project as well.
But the greatest influences, according to Yeltsin, were not Kulikov or Clinton and not the oligarchs, with whom he had been out of contact. They were Tatyana Dyachenko and Anatolii Chubais. Tatyana secured an appointment with Yeltsin for Chubais, also on March 18, and Chubais for the one and only time in his years with Yeltsin raised the volume of his voice in protest. The one-hour meeting, Yeltsin said in his memoirs, made him feel “ashamed before those who had trusted me.” He got in a poke at Chubais in the conversation—“You also made plenty of mistakes in privatization,” he said. But he heeded the advice and that day dropped his ill-considered plan. 52 Blessedly for Russia and for his reputation, he had come to his senses—for which those who tar him with neo-Bolshevism give him not a granule of thanks. “The president,” Kulikov writes accurately, “was wise enough to overstep himself and his character. He understood that the undertaking could end tragically and that some people were trying to use him.”53
On March 19, the day after finally giving the election a green light, Yeltsin appointed a new campaign council, chaired by himself, with Viktor Chernomyrdin as deputy chairman. But his most consequential decision was to impanel an “analytical group” under Chubais, who had agreed to it at a rendezvous with the oligarchs in Berezovskii’s Logovaz Club—an ideal place, Berezovskii chortled, because no one could bug it with listening devices except him. Chubais accepted several million dollars up front for campaign expenses, from which he was to deduct a monthly salary of $60,000. True to form, Yeltsin did not do away with the Soskovets grouping, whose senior members joined the council and which continued to occupy offices on a different floor of the Presidential Hotel. The nomination formalities, completed by April 5, were dealt with by an All-Russian Movement for Public Support of the President, an ecumenical front of 250 preexisting organizations headed up by Sergei Filatov, Yeltsin’s former chief of staff. It stayed around to liaise with regional and local leaders, while another organization still, People’s House, made connections to citizen groups and was the unofficial disburser of campaign funds.
The nerve center was the Chubais workshop, which, beginning about April 1, met five or six days a week, two to three hours at a time. Yeltsin sat in on a half-dozen of its meetings, although, knowing his aversion to collective decision making, members mostly went to see him singly or in pairs. The group took in the pollster Aleksandr Oslon, of the Public Opinion Foundation; Valentin Yumashev; presidential assistants Ilyushin and Satarov; Vasilii Shakhnovskii, chief of staff to Mayor Luzhkov; Igor Malashenko, the president of NTV, and Sergei Zverev, an executive in Media-Most, NTV’s corporate parent; and Sergei Shakhrai, once deputy premier and now a Duma deputy. The tenth member was Tatyana Dyachenko. Casually dressed and in flowing bangs, she was never far from Yeltsin’s side between then and the July runoff. She carried messages back and forth and advised on his grooming and the staging of campaign appearances. “On everything else,” says an eyewitness, “she felt herself unprepared.”54
Aleksandr Korzhakov, stung by Yeltsin’s change of heart, traduced the new team and continued his efforts to abort the election, holding exploratory talks with Chernomyrdin, the KPRF leadership, and others. On April 16, in a lengthy meeting with the prime minister at the Presidential Club, he flattered Chernomyrdin and poked fun at the Chubais group (they were wetbehind-the-ears pupils and laboratory assistants), savaged Viktor Ilyushin for defecting to them (“Viktor has no ideas of his own”), and said the vote, if held, was winnable by only a few percentage points and would thus be illegitimate. Apparently getting some sympathy from Chernomyrdin, Korzhakov said again that the presidential election should be postponed by two years and, in a new kink, that the neo-communists should be brought into a coalition government to rule until then. “The chief himself will be against this idea,” Korzhakov quotes himself as saying about Yeltsin, “but he can be broken.” 55 In late April, in Khabarovsk, Korzhakov pulled aside Naina Yeltsina and asked her to deliver a letter to the chief. She was reluctant, since she stayed out of decisions of state, but gave Yeltsin the letter at Barvikha-4 upon their return. It touched on the election and argued that there was an urgent need to appoint Oleg Soskovets prime minister. Yeltsin read it and threw it in the wastebasket, an angry look on his face.56 On May 5 Korzhakov, who rarely spoke with journalists, brazenly called in a press interview for a two-year deferral of the vote for stability’s sake. The next day, with a beatific-looking Korzhakov behind him, Yeltsin informed the press that the election would be held without fail and that he had ordered his chief bodyguard “not to meddle in politics.” “I trust in the wisdom of the Russian voters,” he said. “That’s why the election will be held in the time determined by the constitution.”57
Yeltsin took some time to make his peace with the re-election assignment and with having to ask the people on bended knee for what he had come to see as rightfully his, so unlike the cakewalks of 1989, 1990, and 1991. By the time he made his first forays into the heartland, he had modified his posture. What tipped him were recognition of the novelty of the quest, the alacrity of the Chubais group, and the clicking in of his personal testing script: “He caught fire. . . . He assimilated it as a new game for himself. . . . He was the ideal candidate. It had all begun to be attractive to him. He could not get enough of it.”58
The principal adversary was Gennadii Zyuganov, who had chaired the KPRF since its founding in 1993. Zyuganov, a propaganda specialist in his home province of Orël and in Moscow before 1991, epitomized the gray apparatchik who had kept faith with state socialism. Presenting himself as the voice of “responsible opposition” and of “popular-patriotic forces” that went beyond his party, he charged that Yeltsin had not kept a single promise since he beat out Nikolai Ryzhkov for the presidency five years before. He advocated constitutional changes to strengthen parliament and reintroduce the office of vice president (Yeltsin’s former vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoi, supported Zyuganov), appointment of a medical c
ommission to review the health of leaders (an obvious dig at Yeltsin), settlement of back wages, measures “to guarantee all citizens the right to labor, leisure, housing, free education and medical care, and a worthy old age,” and a review of privatization policy.59
The two principal combatants were joined by a piebald field of eight lesser contestants. Two were put forward by political parties that had standing in the Duma: Vladimir Zhirinovskii, the publicity hound and head of the scrappily imperialist LDPR; and Grigorii Yavlinskii of the liberal Yabloko Party, an economist by training and one of the authors of the Five Hundred Days Program in 1990. The semiforgotten Mikhail Gorbachev chose to run for the office that Yeltsin had used to destroy his power base, describing himself as Russia’s candidate of “consolidation.” The most serious of the independent candidates was Aleksandr Lebed, a gravel-voiced professional soldier from the Soviet military’s airborne branch who had retired from the service as a two-star general in 1995. Lebed’s defense of the Slavic minorities in post-Soviet Moldova, as commander of the Russian Fourteenth Army there, gave him cachet with nationalists, and his platform emphasized law and order. The four remaining candidates ran as personalities, although nominated by tiny political organizations: Vladimir Bryntsalov, a businessman who had made millions in the pharmaceuticals industry; Svyatoslav Fëdorov, the eye surgeon whom Yeltsin had tried to make prime minister in 1991; Martin Shakkum, a think-tank scholar; and Yurii Vlasov, once a world-champion weightlifter and now a Duma deputy and Russian chauvinist.60
Yeltsin and his administration did nothing to impede the registration of other candidates but did try hard to persuade several of them to drop out in his favor or at a minimum not to come together into a potential “third force” in the campaign. The priorities were Lebed, whose curt, masculine deportment was selling well,61 and Yavlinskii. Since Yeltsin knew from polls that Lebed would draw first-round votes away from Zyuganov, the objective was to gain his cooperation in the two-candidate runoff, Zyuganov against Yeltsin, that was expected to follow. Lebed initiated the contact secretly and met in April with Aleksandr Korzhakov. Korzhakov offered him command of Russian airborne forces, saying he did not know enough about the economy to succeed in politics, and Lebed declined, with the statement, “I know my price.”62 Lebed called on Yeltsin in the Kremlin on May 2 and the negotiations restarted. Within several weeks, the general agreed to throw his support to the president in the second round; he would get an infusion of campaign funds in the first round and appointment as minister of defense after it.63 Aleksandr Oslon’s research showed Yavlinskii as competing for votes with Yeltsin, not Zyuganov, and suggested that his supporters would migrate naturally to Yeltsin in the second round, so it was desirable to knock him out of round one. Negotiations through intermediaries began in January, and Yavlinskii met with Yeltsin on May 5 and 16. The older man “entreated, browbeat, pressured, and buttered up” the younger to throw in the towel and accept the position of first deputy premier; Yavlinskii demanded the dismissal of Chernomyrdin and other points Yeltsin found unacceptable. “I would not have withdrawn, either,” Yeltsin told him as he showed him to the door in Building No. 1 on May 16.64
Bare-knuckle tactics were deployed in other areas, too. Chernomyrdin assigned a deputy premier, Yurii Yarov, to work daily with the campaign staff and see to it that the federal bureaucracy used “administrative levers” as best it could to the president’s gain. Sergei Shakhrai handled relations with the governors and republic presidents, most of whom swung into line.65 The Kremlin collected explicit endorsements, among them from dignitaries (such as Yegor Gaidar) who had split with Yeltsin, and unformalized support from the Russian Orthodox Church and the military hierarchy. The mass media, and especially the three national television channels, on which paid advertising for the candidates opened on May 14, were of special concern. The ORT and RTR networks were owned by the state; NTV was privately owned and had been very critical of the war in Chechnya, but it broadcast on sufferance of Yeltsin’s government. And yet, coercion was not the primary reason the media sided with Yeltsin in 1996. Since the alternatives appeared to boil down to him or a return of the communists who had censored the press for seventy years, it seemed to most journalists and media managers, as Igor Malashenko put it, that “damaging” as it might have been for the press to take sides in a political conflict, its corporate self-interest meant it “did not have any choice” in the matter. Malashenko remained as president of NTV while moonlighting as Yeltsin’s chief media adviser. Although he considered resigning or going on leave from the network, “I believed this would have been just cant, because everybody in Russia would know that this is not the United States, that my position in the [NTV] group would be the same.”66 Between mid-May and mid-June, 55 percent of all campaign stories on ORT’s nightly prime-time news mentioned Yeltsin, compared to 35 percent mentions for Zyuganov; on NTV’s program, it was 59 percent and 34 percent.67
None of these methods, however, was enough to dictate victory. Yeltsin was not able to oust Yavlinskii, and the backing from Lebed would take effect only in a runoff round. The electronic and print media had been skewed toward Our Home Is Russia in 1995, and that had not done the party or Chernomyrdin much good.68 A great many citizens distrusted the news media and did not believe them to be even-handed; almost 40 percent of Russians had questions about coverage of the 1995 Duma campaign and more than 50 percent about the 1996 presidential campaign.69 Even with the media elite’s bias toward Yeltsin, the flow of information and advocacy that got through to individual voters was quite large and diverse. Paid ads aside, a lottery gave all candidates eight free ten-minute slots on national television. As of the beginning of June, a non-trivial 45 percent of the population had been exposed to Zyuganov campaign materials on television, on the radio, or in print in the preceding week; for Yeltsin, it was 58 percent.70 And news bulletins, particularly on NTV, offered substantial reportage on opposition candidates (mostly by replaying their words) and on issues, such as economic difficulties and Yeltsin’s health, that were inconvenient for the president.71
From his single-digit popularity in January, Yeltsin rebounded to a plurality of the votes in June and a second-round majority in July. In Aleksandr Oslon’s first systematic poll of the electorate on March 1, 13 percent of Russians intending to vote in the first round preferred Yeltsin and 19 percent Zyuganov. Over the course of March and April, Yeltsin’s anticipated vote share doubled while Zyuganov’s only edged up. The first Oslon poll to show Yeltsin ahead of Zyuganov, by 23 percent to 22 percent, was on April 13, but they were tied on April 20 and again on May 4. On May 11 Yeltsin nosed ahead by 4 points, by 28 percent to 24 percent, and he never looked back after that. By June 11, 36 percent of citizens intended to vote for him and Zyuganov’s expected share had dipped to 18 percent.72 The spread narrowed some by election day, but any way you look at it was a blockbuster recovery. And it was achieved in all demographic subgroups, be they by age, community size and location, gender, or social class.73
One device whereby Yeltsin could overcome his initial deficit in public opinion was to employ incumbency to bolster his image, shape the campaign agenda, and offer amends for the deficiencies of the previous five years. Even before declaring his candidacy, he issued the first of a string of edicts directing material assistance to target groups. On January 25 he decreed a 50 percent increase in payments to recipients of old-age, survivor, and invalid pensions above the minimum pension. Another decree raised grants for students in universities and institutes by 20 percent. On February 1 he ordered stricter schedules for payment of wages to public-sector workers, including the military and police. Orders to clear up arrears in the nonstate sector were given the next week.
The foreign-policy realm offered opportunities for reputation building. Bill Clinton had agreed in 1995 to hold off on NATO enlargement until after the election, responding to Yeltsin’s plea that “my position heading into 1996 is not exactly brilliant.”74 Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany visited Yeltsin
on February 20, four days after his statement of candidacy, and pronounced him “the best president for Russia.” Kohl, it is claimed, offered Yeltsin political asylum in Germany should he lose the election, a suggestion Yeltsin found insulting.75 In March the IMF unveiled a $10.2 billion loan to the Russian government, the second-largest it had ever made. On April 2 Yeltsin signed an agreement with President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus to create a “community” of the post-Soviet neighbors. The document opened, he said, “a qualitatively new stage in the history of our two brotherly peoples.” National television broadcast the Kremlin event live. On April 20 the G-7 leaders were in town for a joint meeting with Russia, chaired by Yeltsin, on nuclear security. It was done, according to President Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott, “for no other purpose than to give Yeltsin a pre-election boost.” A meeting at Spaso House with opposition candidates was on Clinton’s itinerary. “It’s okay to shake hands with Zyuganov, Bill,” Yeltsin said, “but don’t kiss him.”76 Summiteers Clinton, Jacques Chirac of France, and Ryutaro Hashimoto of Japan stayed on an extra day for bilateral talks and photo ops. Several days later Yeltsin was off to China for a state visit. On May 16 UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali helpfully paid his respects in Moscow, and on May 17 a summit of CIS leaders did the same. James D. Wolfensohn of the World Bank stopped by the Kremlin on May 23 to announce a $500 million project for the coal industry. “The timing of the loan is purely coincidental,” he said with a straight face. “But I was happy to do it in support of the government’s reform efforts.”77
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