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 commission 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