What is more, the deal was hardly necessary. The government did not owe any favours to tycoons. The risk of losing their wealth and influence – if not their freedom – in case of Yeltsin’s defeat was enough of an incentive for them to rally behind Yeltsin.
The biggest help provided by the oligarchs was not money, but ideas. The oligarchs put together a rival campaign headquarters that was headed by Chubais and included Yeltsin’s own daughter Tatyana Dyachenko and her husband Valentin Yumashev, a former journalist and Yeltsin’s ghost writer. Igor Malashenko was seconded from NTV to the Kremlin to lead the media campaign. The team told Yeltsin that despite his dismal 5 per cent rating he could still win the election, if he entrusted the campaign to them. Yeltsin was suspicious. Faced with the prospect of losing power to people whom he had literally shelled out of the White House three years earlier, Yeltsin felt the risks were too high to experiment with ‘election games’ run by private businessmen and their brainy men.
This is what Korzhakov told him: ‘You will only lose time with all these election games, and then what?’ Like any Russian politician in a moment of crisis, Yeltsin naturally leaned towards the security services. ‘Comparing two strategies offered to me by two teams different in their mentality and approach, I felt I could not wait until the election results in June. I had to act now!’ he wrote in his memoirs.35
Yeltsin told his aides to draft a decree banning the Communist Party, dissolving parliament and postponing elections for two years. The idea horrified Chubais’s team. Yeltsin’s aides leaked his secret plans to Kiselev, who torpedoed them by breaking the news on Itogi. Dyachenko persuaded Yeltsin to hear out Chubais, who told him the situation was completely different from 1993, and dissolving parliament would be equal to a coup. Yeltsin shouted a lot but succumbed to the pressure. ‘I reversed a decision I had almost made,’ he recalled in his memoirs.36
A day or two later, Dyachenko brought Malashenko before her father. Malashenko felt confident that Yeltsin could win the elections honestly as long as he ran a proper campaign. This confidence was based on a simple assumption that however bitter people might feel about Yeltsin himself, the majority of Russians did not wish to return to the communist past which Zyuganov represented.
‘I told him that there was a big gap between his low rating and the anti-communist sentiment which could be turned into votes, if he campaigned,’ Malashenko said. Yeltsin seemed relieved. ‘It was as though I had told him something that he had thought about himself and wanted to hear from someone else. He was clearly tired, but his eyes suddenly lit up. He got everything I told him extremely quickly and he engaged. It was like a game of ping-pong.’37 Sensing the scent of a genuine political fight, Yeltsin sprang back to life. Gaidar, who came to see Yeltsin around the same time, could barely recognize him. ‘He was crisp, focused, energetic and quickly grasped the essence of his interlocutor’s thoughts and asked the right questions. It was as though the past five years were erased and we were back in October 1991, at our first meeting.’38
Malashenko had never run an election campaign in his life. All he knew – from his time at the US and Canada Institute – was how it was done in America and he built the campaign with the vigour and aggression suitable for an American presidential candidate. During this time he formally remained the head of NTV. To step down from NTV or to get a formal secondment would have been hypocriticaclass="underline" in the Russia of the 1990s nobody would have believed in this separation.
Malashenko told Yeltsin that he needed to generate news every day which television could report. Yeltsin’s first trip to Krasnodar – a communist stronghold – was a disaster. The president and his entourage walked down an empty street that had been cleared by his security and waved at the crowd of people that had been cordoned off. When Yeltsin returned to Moscow, Malashenko and Chubais put two photographs in front of him. One showed Yeltsin in 1991 in the midst of a jubilant crowd – a true people’s president. The other one was of his visit to Krasnodar where he looked like a Soviet-era boss. ‘Yeltsin got it. The staged Soviet-style visits stopped straight away and he started to work,’ Malashenko recalled.39
Within a few weeks Yeltsin had shed nearly 10 kg (22 pounds) and stopped drinking. He regained his charisma and sparkle. He criss-crossed the country holding American-style election rallies. He went down mines in Vorkuta, a horrific Gulag town in the north whose coal miners went unpaid for months; in a crisp white shirt he danced the twist, in sweltering heat, in the southern town of Rostov, swaying his hips and flapping his elbows. Over the three months of the election campaign Yeltsin flew to twenty-six regions across nine time zones.
The main strategy of Yeltsin’s campaign was to mobilize the anti-communist votes, presenting the election as a final and decisive battle between the Soviet communist regime and anti-Soviet democratic reforms. The media’s job was to stoke and exploit the fears of a communist comeback. The threat was somewhat exaggerated, not least because the communists did not seem that desperate to gain real power in the country, but it provided the best consolidation ground for Yeltsin’s electorate.
An agitprop-style propaganda sheet headed Ne dai Bog (God Forbid) illustrated the spirit of the campaign. It was published by Vladimir Yakovlev, the founder of Kommersant; 10 million copies were distributed for free across provincial Russia. It played on the common fears and memories of empty shelves and long queues in shops. It drew parallels between Zyuganov and Hitler; it ran interviews with famous artists who spoke of their fears of bloodshed and ruin in the case of a communist victory. The paper’s budget (apparently $8 million) and the source of money were a closely guarded secret. But while newspapers were small weaponry, television was the heavy artillery.
To mobilize the young voters who normally did not vote, Yeltsin’s media campaigners came up with the slogan ‘Vote or Lose’, adapted from Bill Clinton’s ‘Choose or Lose’. What the voters stood to lose was illustrated by videos and animated cartoons. ‘If your fridge is empty, all television channels show the same programme and you receive only one newspaper, then the “happy tomorrow” is here,’ a voice warned in one such cartoon. An even more important slogan was ‘Vote with Your Heart’ and was aimed at older and more reliable Russian voters. With melancholic music in the background, election advertisements showed ordinary old Russian men and women calmly talking about their families and their experiences of living under the communists, of repressions and collectivization, of their reluctance to go back to the Soviet era and their hopes for Yeltsin. ‘If the communists come to power, they will take my land – just like before,’ a Russian farmer said. ‘Let Yeltsin finish the good things that he has started,’ a woman in a headscarf insisted. Whatever the motives, Yeltsin’s campaign appealed to the sensibility and the best instincts in Russian people.
It began with a summary of Yeltsin’s heroic political career, followed by extensive coverage of his campaign. Yeltsin was shown visiting the ancient city of Yaroslavl’, promising to give its cash-strapped citizens ‘everything and to take back nothing’. He was shown in the newly restored Cathedral of Christ the Saviour near the Kremlin, ‘ruined under the communists and restored under Yeltsin’. Gennady Zyuganov, Yeltsin’s main communist rival, was depicted hobnobbing with the oligarchs in Davos or in international airport VIP lounges.