A ragged troupe headed by Aleksandr Muzykantskii, a Gosstroi engineer and friend of Lev Sukhanov, ran the campaign. Several were to stick with Yeltsin afterward. Valerii Bortsov, a junior apparatchik in the south Russian city of Rostov, took the train to Moscow in January to offer his services. He got a meeting with Yeltsin, who decided to make him an unpaid assistant. At a rally in February, Yeltsin teasingly asked Valentina Lantseva, a Pravda correspondent from Kazakhstan who was carrying a basket of flowers she had bought for her husband’s birthday, if they were for him. They struck up a conversation and exchanged telephone numbers. Three days later, she agreed to be his press spokesperson, also without pay.53
Yeltsin’s campaign brochure, “Perestroika Will Bring Changes,” came out on March 21, only five days before the vote. Yeltsin posters were pasted in apartment stairwells, on lampposts, and at public-transit stops. A committee of activists in nineteen factories and institutes spread the word at the workplace level.54 Digging for the public-speaking skills honed in Sverdlovsk and the Moscow gorkom, Yeltsin darted across the city, giving several talks daily and answering reams of questions, town meeting–style. The crowds in parks, hockey arenas, and stadiums reached into the tens of thousands by the last week. Many fans wore sandwich-boards, had “Fight, Boris!” (Boris’, Boris!) buttons on their lapels, or carried hand-lettered signs blaring “Hands Off of Yeltsin,” “Boris Is Right,” “We Are with You, Comrade Yeltsin,” “Not the People for Socialism but Socialism for the People.” Yeltsin lapped up the attention. His war cry was the “struggle for justice” and against moribund practices and privilege. Bill Keller of the New York Times caught the flavor of an open-air rally in front of 7,000 shivering urbanites:
Mr. Yeltsin has a rapport with an audience that is rarely seen in Soviet politics and is a bit frightening even to some of his supporters. Today the crowd greeted him with an outpouring of protective emotion, warning him not to risk trouble by answering “provocative” questions passed up to him from the crowd, and at one point ordering him to put on his fur cap so he would not catch cold in the rising breeze. He did.
He has turned the party’s attacks on him to his advantage, using them to underline his underdog status and his bond with the common man. That is now part of Mr. Yeltsin’s standard speech, along with populist demands that the bigshots give up their privileges, that the people be allowed to decide issues by referendum, and that the Communist Party be brought under the control of an elected government.55
All appearances concluded with Yeltsin clapping his hands, then clasping them in front of his forehead and wagging them in the direction of the audience.
Yeltsin’s one opponent was the old-line director of the ZIL auto plant, Yevgenii Brakov; more than twenty potential candidates, including Politburo member Vitalii Vorotnikov, withdrew. Brakov made an ideal personal foil, but Yeltsin sanctimoniously refused to stoop to unsportsmanlike “American” methods. Planted questions—asking him to explain, for instance, the Ipat’ev House demolition in Sverdlovsk or how his daughter Yelena had been issued a nomenklatura apartment in 1987—caused him heartburn but were lost in the shuffle.56 And the party’s dirty tricks—defacing Yeltsin signs, cooking up pro-Brakov letters to Moskovskaya pravda, sending claques to Brakov rallies—backfired and played into his David-versus-Goliath image. In early March, the long-delayed publication in a CPSU journal of the record of the October 1987 plenum was manna from heaven. Vitalii Tret’yakov, who would eventually repent of his support, gushed that the transcript showed Yeltsin to be prescient (“he alone said yesterday what everyone is discussing now”), an information democrat (“the destroyer of secrets always ingratiates people”), and civic-minded (he “is not fighting for power for his own sake”).57 Ten days before the election, the Central Committee took the misguided decision to impanel a commission, chaired by Politburo member Vadim Medvedev, to see if Yeltsin had deviated from the Communist Party line. The three largest rallies of the race—and the largest public gatherings in Moscow since the 1917 revolution—were called to protest the commission, which was to be quietly dropped in May. Yeltsin gauged it and the ersatz letters to the editor (Lantseva showed many were counterfeit) to have fattened his vote total by 15 to 20 percentage points.
Other candidates hopped on the bandwagon. The thirty-five-year-old Sergei Stankevich, a historian specializing in the U.S. Congress who was in a neck-and-neck race in the Cherëmushkii area of Moscow, sent Yeltsin a telegram of endorsement and then photocopied it and used it as an advertisement for himself. Twenty-six other liberal candidates, mostly professors, scientists, and literati, did the same. Some distributed pictures of themselves shaking hands with Yeltsin. Stankevich, who had organized a pro-Yeltsin demonstration at a Moscow subway stop in November 1987, could not because he had never met him.58 Across the city, “The main orienting points . . . were opposition to all the bosses and support for everyone who was for Yeltsin. All candidates with a lower rank than their main opponents did everything they could to emphasize their ordinariness, almost as if it were a nobleman’s title, and all who had the slightest basis for doing so played up their nearness to Yeltsin.”59
Yeltsin glided home in District No. 1 with 89 percent of the popular vote on March 26—5,117,745 out of 5,736,470 votes cast, with little variation across districts. Since Moscow had 1.1 million CPSU members and Brakov’s take was less than 400,000, Yeltsin netted the ballots of most of Moscow’s communists, to say nothing of noncommunists. Even in neighborhoods peopled by high-ranking party workers and bureaucrats, Brakov did not rise above 30 percent.60 Intimates of Gorbachev told the American ambassador, Jack Matlock, they had been sure Yeltsin would win but were “astonished by how much.”61 Yeltsin’s personal absolution and his drubbing of the nomenklatura candidate stole headlines from the change in institutions and political process represented by the holding of a semifree election. Candidates who had put their names on the Stankevich telegram polled 20 percentage points more on average than candidates who did not. First Secretary Lev Zaikov, like Gorbachev, took election as part of the Central Committee hundred rather than try his chances in a Moscow district. Second Secretary Yurii Prokof’ev ran in a district and was trounced, with 13 percent of the votes; Valerii Saikin, the mayor, got 42 percent in his district and pulled out of the runoff that was required when no one had secured a majority in the first lap.
In a lucid election postmortem, Tret’yakov reported how Yeltsin’s win made explicit every one of the implicit lessons of October–November 1987. People were connecting the dots:
Many people identify with Yeltsin. He is a victim of the higher-ups. Who of us has not been in the same position? And he is being slighted for refusing to seek their approval. Who has not dreamt of doing this? The main thing is that he speaks with everyone, with those below and those above, in the same way and as an equal, breaking the hierarchical barriers that everyone, especially below, is sick of.
Even his detractors, Tret’yakov continued, “never tire of reiterating his positive features,” and Yeltsin came across as “contradictory but likeable in a human way even in his gaffes and inconsistencies.” Most important were the mass perceptions of the gravitas that accrued to Yeltsin from his background in the governing elite: