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