A security issue of domestic scope where again incumbency could be applied was the quagmire in Chechnya. With one eye on the opinion polls, Yeltsin on March 31 announced a presidential “peace initiative” designed by his adviser Emil Pain, still claiming there could be no direct negotiations with the separatist president, Djokhar Dudayev. The killing of Dudayev on April 21 (he was hit by a Russian missile while talking on a satellite phone to a member of the State Duma) removed that obstacle, and Yeltsin signaled he was willing to meet the new Chechen leadership. On May 27 a deputation of five fighters, flown to Moscow with their bodyguards in a presidential aircraft, was ushered into a Kremlin office. Swiss diplomat Tim Guldimann of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe attended to help mediate. Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the leader of the team—a former poet and children’s author, he was attired in green battle fatigues and a papakha, the Chechens’ tall, flat-topped lambskin hat—argued with Yeltsin about seating order, with Yeltsin insisting he be at the head of the table. Yandarbiyev said he might have to pull out of the talks. Yeltsin first told the guards to seal the doors, then asked Guldimann to take his place and sat down across from the Chechen. Yeltsin next sought to gain the upper hand by acting the part of the masterful host. “As an experienced administrator, he knew that in such cases it is best to obtain a psychological advantage over the opposing side. The quickest way to get it is to find a pretense for an earboxing. ‘I do not understand,’ he said in an ice-cold voice. ‘Nobody has ever had the nerve to be late for a meeting with me. You got here late. I could have scrapped our meeting if I felt like it.’ Yandarbiyev shook and made apologies.”78 After the conclusion of their conversation, Chernomyrdin stepped in to work out an agreement with Yandarbiyev on a truce in the war, effective midnight May 31, to be followed by an exchange of prisoners and negotiations for a peace settlement. Off-camera, Yeltsin growled that if the Chechens did not honor their commitments, “We know how to find everyone who has signed this document.”79
The next day Yeltsin flew to Grozny, pushing aside a warning by officers from the security services, whom he called cowards, that Shamil Basayev’s hawkish group was going to assassinate him by shooting down the presidential helicopter with a U.S.-made Stinger missile. To preempt objections from Naina, he told her he was going to spend the day in the Kremlin. He was accompanied by Governor Boris Nemtsov of Nizhnii Novgorod, who a few months before had presented him with a million signatures from the Volga area protesting the war.80 Yeltsin signed two ancillary decrees in the republic, one of them on the steel frame of an armored personnel carrier. Every minute of his six hours there was mined for visuals and sound bites for the final weeks of the election campaign. Aleksandr Oslon’s interviewers found in early June that two-thirds of the electorate approved of Yeltsin’s peace initiative.81
The second way Yeltsin promoted his candidacy was to bifurcate the electorate around the paradigmatic question of choice of regime and to give the vote the properties of a referendum, in all but name, on communism versus democracy. This was the question Yeltsin had posed with such science during his rise to power, only augmented now with the prospect that any attempt to restore communism would put Russia through one more revolution. Yeltsin’s experience in the Kremlin, reasoned a confidential analysis for the campaign in April, should be made to count in his favor, and it should be coupled with the point that “nothing except instability and unpredictability can be expected” from the other candidates.82 In 1995 and early 1996, another memorandum laid out in May, Russians mostly asked who should answer for the country’s plight. “But with the approach of the election the question, ‘Who is guilty?’ began to be replaced by the question, ‘What will it be like after the election?’ For the majority of the population, the future election is connected with the choice of the lesser of two evils. The main motive here is turning out to be to escape shakeups after the election.”83
The self-criticism in Yeltsin’s rhetoric was an invitation to opponents and doubters to cross the line into his camp. Mistakes had been made in the design of the reforms, he said on April 6. “We from the very beginning undervalued the importance of constant dialogue with citizens.” Many Russians had not yet benefited from the post-communist changes, he conceded, and there had arisen “parasitic capital,” which concentrated on the division of property rather than economic growth. But it would be very different in a second Yeltsin term. Russia, he stated, would have a 5 percent economic growth rate within two or three years, and the fruits would be spread around more fairly.84
Television ads to expand on Yeltsin’s speeches were prepared by Video International, Russia’s largest TV advertising agency, with advice from the U.S. public-relations firm Ogilvy and Mather—whose 1996 clients included Dresdner Bank, American Express, Unilever, and Telefonica—and from other American and British consultants. Forty-five short ads on the theme “I Believe, I Love, I Hope” ran two or three per evening. Laymen selected to represent a type (farmer, doctor, housewife, athlete, student, and so forth) spoke soothingly about the future in store if Yeltsin got his second mandate. In one of the first to air, a World War II veteran “looks straight into the camera and says wistfully, ‘I just want my children and grandchildren to finally savor the fruits of the victory we fought for and that they didn’t let us enjoy.’ ‘They’ is a not-so-subliminal reference to communists.” 85 A related series of “Choose or Lose” clips and rock concerts were aimed at getting younger citizens to turn out to vote. At the same time, anti-communist videos, posters, and billboards represented the Soviet regime in a harsh light, through representations of labor camps, bare store shelves, and overage Politburo members reviewing parades on Lenin’s tomb. Borderline demagogic as the line was, it served Yeltsin’s electoral purpose admirably. Of men and women who preferred the post-Soviet political system, almost 70 percent backed Yeltsin on June 16 and fewer than 10 percent voted for Zyuganov; among backers of the Soviet polity, the proportions were reversed.86
A third vote-getting technique was hinged on Boris Yeltsin’s persona. The candidate in this mode would be presented as a father figure, rugged and knowing but also suffering and recovering with his people. A gauzy “Vote with Your Heart” ad series was unrolled in May, after extensive survey and focus-group research. As Yeltsin noted in a memoir, “Humble people were shown speaking on the television screen what they thought of me. . . . Interest in the president’s personality rose. The people were surprised and started thinking . . . [and] woke up. . . . ‘Look at the new Yeltsin [they said], he has come alive, he is up to something, so maybe we should bet on him again!’”87 In the closing days of the campaign, an ad was aired showing Yeltsin musing about his youth and his courtship of Naina Yeltsina, to the accompaniment of schmaltzy music. To improve her husband’s image, Naina gave press interviews about their children, grandchildren, and family life. A mass-distributed photo album and documentary film shots showed the president bone tired, elated, and frustrated and pictured his thumbless left hand, which he normally did his best to conceal.
This strand of the re-election campaign must be judged a qualified success. In-depth survey data from the summer of 1996 show majorities reckoning Yeltsin to be intelligent and possessed of a vision of Russia’s future, while opinion on his strength and trustworthiness split evenly. On one character trait, though, Yeltsin continued to get consistently critical assessments. That trait was empathy, where respondents were asked if Yeltsin “really cares about people like you.” Only one person in four agreed with that statement, and responses were closely correlated with economic assessments.88 That explains the seriousness with which the Yeltsin campaign took its fourth objective—to find ways to bring him down from his lordly perch to relate to Russia’s transitional citizens as human beings.
The greening of Yeltsin could be attempted through the electronic advertising blitz and through creative use of incumbency. In the latter capacity, Yeltsin played Santa Claus for a solid half-year, ladling out material and symbolic largesse t
o well-selected segments of the populace. The economic payout was brought about by administrative discipline and legerdemain, use of foreign credits, and borrowing against future revenues. In January, February, and March, Yeltsin signed seven or eight decrees per month allocating concrete benefits to particular constituencies; the number hit twenty-two in April and thirty-four in May and the first two weeks of June.89 Although many of his acts of generosity were in response to requests, “Often Yeltsin was the inspirer of the decrees, which . . . grew copiously in the election season. He felt an especially sharp need for them in May. Getting his assistants together, he would demand from them ‘fresh ideas for decrees.’”90
Responding to Yeltsin’s January and February directives and to dogged pressure from the government and the presidential executive office, back wages in the nonstate sector were paid up by early April; in the state sector, a large improvement was made by early May. National-level initiatives in social spending raised pensions for war veterans and other elders, allowances for single mothers and diabetics, and salaries and summer pay for teachers and scientists; ordered restitution for bank depositors whose savings were made worthless by hyperinflation in 1992; and instituted a loan program for house builders. Other decrees singled out aerospace contractors, the agrarian complex, and small businesses. In the symbolic domain, there was something for almost everybody. Several decrees recognized the rights of Cossack communities shattered by the communists. In April Yeltsin ruled that a Soviet-style red banner (adorned with a gold star in place of the communist hammer-and-sickle) would fly alongside the Russian tricolor at patriotic observances, while having the Presidential Regiment fitted out in splendid new dress uniforms recalling the tsar’s guard force before 1917.91 In a sop to youth, he decreed on May 16 that Russia would have an all-volunteer army and conscription would be ended by 2000.
The biggest contribution of Igor Malashenko was to convince Yeltsin of the need for direct communication with the public. This was a way to both go beyond mediated contact and supply raw material for circulation in the mass media. In one of their first meetings, Malashenko told Yeltsin the story of how George H. W. Bush had profited politically from his dropping in at a New Jersey flag factory during the 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis. Yeltsin needed scenes like that, Malashenko said, and would have to generate one headline per day that could be associated with him personally. “He grasped it at once,” Malashenko recalled. “I never had a reason to complain because, although his health was waning, he did incredible things. He made news every day.”92 It took several weeks for Yeltsin to grasp that he had to make contact locally and in the flesh. He wended his way through the Belgorod area south of Moscow in the first week of April and then through Krasnodar and Budënnovsk, the site of the 1995 terror incident, in mid-April. In Krasnodar Yeltsin stood behind a line of guards, with silent people kept at a distance. Malashenko and Chubais showed him photographs of the scene and contrasted it to his barnstorming in 1989–91. On his next field trip, to Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East (where he dropped in on his way to Beijing), Yeltsin hoofed it into the crowd and “it produced a whole different image.”93
May 3 found Yeltsin in Yaroslavl, on the Volga north of Moscow. The next week he alighted in Volgograd and Astrakhan on the lower Volga, and the week after that in central Siberia. The northern reaches of European Russia and the Urals followed at the end of May, and then came Tver, Kazan, two jaunts into the North Caucasus, west Siberia, Nizhnii Novgorod and the middle Volga, St. Petersburg, and, for a curtain call, Yekaterinburg on June 14. On May 9, for Victory Day over Nazi Germany, Yeltsin addressed the parade in Moscow’s Red Square. He then jetted to Volgograd, the former Stalingrad, to speak a second time at Mamayev Kurgan, the tumulus looking out over the Volga that bears a towering statue of Mother Russia. It was dusk, and people lit candles and flashlights. Press secretary Sergei Medvedev stood next to him: “I could sense that he was stirred up, as if by the common breathing of thousands of people. He had with him some prepared materials but threw them away and spoke effusively. . . . The people accepted him and cried out. . . . It was as if the air was electric, and he could feel it.”94 The kinder, gentler Yeltsin jested with well-wishers and asked if they had questions for him, kissed ladies’ hands, and laid wreaths at statues and war memorials. Cordless microphone in hand, he forged through town squares, cathedrals, produce markets, army barracks, pig farms, fish hatcheries, foundries, and coal mines. During an interlude by musicians in Ufa on May 30, he did the twist: “Quite a plucky little twist it was, too, complete with swaying hips, flapping elbows, and upper teeth bared over lower lip. The 10,000 kids . . . went wild.” After Yeltsin waved and left the stage, Andrei Makarevich, lead singer of the rock group Time Machine, which had been kept off the radio under Brezhnev (and which performed before the Moscow White House in August 1991), urged them to vote for Yeltsin “so Time Machine can keep on playing.”95 On June 10 at a concert by the pop singer Yevgenii Osin in a stadium in Rostov, on the Don River, Yeltsin called on the standing-room-only audience to “vote as you should” so they could all “live in a free Russia,” and then doffed his suit jacket and boogie-woogied with Osin and two miniskirted female vocalists.
No campaign event was complete without gifts large and small. The aim was to give a foretaste of the eventual benefits of reform and to underline the candidate’s responsiveness. As each day on the hustings was planned out the evening before, staffers asked Chto podarim zavtra?—“What shall we hand out tomorrow?”96 The city of Yaroslavl provided a typical backcloth, as the New York Times correspondent described:
President Boris N. Yeltsin was in a beneficent, spendthrift mood on the campaign trail today. He promised a Tatar leader he met on the street $50,000 to open a new Muslim cultural center here. He visited a convent of the Russian Orthodox Church and gave $10,000 from the treasury to help cover the nuns’ housekeeping costs. . . . He even vowed to have a telephone installed for a woman who complained that she had been waiting for telephone service for eight years. . . .
But it was at an afternoon encounter with more than thirty local officials, factory directors, and local newspaper editors that Mr. Yeltsin disclosed the risks he is prepared to take in his effort to remain in the Kremlin. . . . Several local officials stood up to complain that taxes were strangling their companies and factories. They begged Mr. Yeltsin to restore a tax break that was introduced in 1994 to help ailing industries burdened by tax debts. . . . Under pressure from the IMF, the Russian government phased out the loophole last year. . . .
[Vladimir] Panskov, the finance minister [of Russia] argued against the loophole] in the middle of the meeting. . . .
Mr. Yeltsin turned to his audience. “The government is definitely against this,” he said. “Can any of you, specialists, economists, think of another way out?”
When they cried “No!” Mr. Yeltsin turned back to his finance minister, who stood waiting, wearing a pained expression. “Before the election,” the president instructed him with a smile, “let’s submit a decree.”
Everyone in the room applauded except Mr. Panskov.97
In the Siberian center of Krasnoyarsk on May 17, Yeltsin jibed to residents that he had thrown a coin into the Yenisei River for luck, “but you should not think that this will be the end of my financial help to the Krasnoyarsk region.”98 On a stopover at the White Sea port of Arkhangelsk on May 24, he proclaimed that he had arrived “with full pockets.” “Today a little money will be coming into Arkhangelsk oblast.”99 Having announced grants to local building projects there, he belted along to a meet-and-run in Vorkuta, a coal-mining center near the mouth of the Ob, where he committed to assistance for the construction of retirement homes in the south, a 50 percent reduction in rail tariffs on coal from the area—and, to miner Lidiya Denisyuk, whom he encountered underground, a Zhiguli car for her disadvantaged family.100 In Chechnya on May 28 with Boris Nemtsov, he asked the governor to deliver Gazelle trucks and Volga cars to Chechen farmers from the GAZ plan
t in Nizhnii Novgorod. In Ufa on May 30, Yeltsin marked the beginning of preparatory construction work for its new subway. In Kazan on June 9, wearing a tyuboteika, a needlepointed Tatar skullcap, he promised to finance a subway; city and republic had been pushing for one since 1983. Elsewhere, the handouts included tractors and combines for kolkhozes, discounts on electricity costs, forgiveness of municipal debts, funds for reconstructing and enlarging libraries and clinics, and power-sharing pacts with governors and republic presidents (twelve of these were finalized during the campaign).
Promises made on the stump would be promises to keep afterward. The unrealism of some of those offered in 1996 was not lost on the craftsmen. They chose to subordinate this point to the realpolitik of winning in the here and now. The populist decree on ending the military draft by 2000 was a case in point. To write it, Yeltsin had to overrule the generals and his national security adviser, Yurii Baturin, who counseled that out of practical considerations the draft could not be dispensed with before 2005. Baturin refused to sign off on the draft edict, whereupon Nikolai Yegorov, the president’s new chief of staff—a conservative with good ties to the army—telephoned to say it would go ahead without him. “Now it is necessary to win the election, and after that we will look into it.”101 Russia today still has conscription.
Yeltsin’s last election campaign was a catch-all campaign. Vitalii Tret’yakov, the editor-in-chief of Nezavisimaya gazeta, saw in his plan of attack the philosophy of Luka, the picaresque codger in the play The Lower Depths, by Maxim Gorky. “Ni odna blokha ne plokha,” Luka quipped to his fellow boarding-house residents—“Every flea is a good flea,” as they are all dark in color and they all know how to jump. “Yeltsin-Luka lets everyone gallop away” to their heart’s content, editorialized Tret’yakov; mixing metaphors, he added that the Yeltsin team had vacuumed up everyone else’s ideas and taken “one million positions on one hundred questions.” He was being somewhat unkind, for Yeltsin was consistent on some higher-order political questions, such as whether or not to let the communists return, while picking his openings on many lower-order questions. But Tret’yakov also noted that to Yeltsin’s million positions his opponents had been “unable to counterpoise clear and legible positions on even ten key problems.”102
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