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 plant 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