A third vote-getting technique was hinged on Boris Yeltsin’s persona. The candidate in this mode would be presented as a father figure, rugged and knowing but also suffering and recovering with his people. A gauzy “Vote with Your Heart” ad series was unrolled in May, after extensive survey and focus-group research. As Yeltsin noted in a memoir, “Humble people were shown speaking on the television screen what they thought of me…. Interest in the president’s personality rose. The people were surprised and started thinking… [and] woke up…. ‘Look at the new Yeltsin [they said], he has come alive, he is up to something, so maybe we should bet on him again!’”87 In the closing days of the campaign, an ad was aired showing Yeltsin musing about his youth and his courtship of Naina Yeltsina, to the accompaniment of schmaltzy music. To improve her husband’s image, Naina gave press interviews about their children, grandchildren, and family life. A mass-distributed photo album and documentary film shots showed the president bone tired, elated, and frustrated and pictured his thumbless left hand, which he normally did his best to conceal.
This strand of the re-election campaign must be judged a qualified success. In-depth survey data from the summer of 1996 show majorities reckoning Yeltsin to be intelligent and possessed of a vision of Russia’s future, while opinion on his strength and trustworthiness split evenly. On one character trait, though, Yeltsin continued to get consistently critical assessments. That trait was empathy, where respondents were asked if Yeltsin “really cares about people like you.” Only one person in four agreed with that statement, and responses were closely correlated with economic assessments.88 That explains the seriousness with which the Yeltsin campaign took its fourth objective—to find ways to bring him down from his lordly perch to relate to Russia’s transitional citizens as human beings.
The greening of Yeltsin could be attempted through the electronic advertising blitz and through creative use of incumbency. In the latter capacity, Yeltsin played Santa Claus for a solid half-year, ladling out material and symbolic largesse to well-selected segments of the populace. The economic payout was brought about by administrative discipline and legerdemain, use of foreign credits, and borrowing against future revenues. In January, February, and March, Yeltsin signed seven or eight decrees per month allocating concrete benefits to particular constituencies; the number hit twenty-two in April and thirty-four in May and the first two weeks of June.89 Although many of his acts of generosity were in response to requests, “Often Yeltsin was the inspirer of the decrees, which… grew copiously in the election season. He felt an especially sharp need for them in May. Getting his assistants together, he would demand from them ‘fresh ideas for decrees.’”90
Responding to Yeltsin’s January and February directives and to dogged pressure from the government and the presidential executive office, back wages in the nonstate sector were paid up by early April; in the state sector, a large improvement was made by early May. National-level initiatives in social spending raised pensions for war veterans and other elders, allowances for single mothers and diabetics, and salaries and summer pay for teachers and scientists; ordered restitution for bank depositors whose savings were made worthless by hyperinflation in 1992; and instituted a loan program for house builders. Other decrees singled out aerospace contractors, the agrarian complex, and small businesses. In the symbolic domain, there was something for almost everybody. Several decrees recognized the rights of Cossack communities shattered by the communists. In April Yeltsin ruled that a Soviet-style red banner (adorned with a gold star in place of the communist hammer-and-sickle) would fly alongside the Russian tricolor at patriotic observances, while having the Presidential Regiment fitted out in splendid new dress uniforms recalling the tsar’s guard force before 1917.91 In a sop to youth, he decreed on May 16 that Russia would have an all-volunteer army and conscription would be ended by 2000.
The biggest contribution of Igor Malashenko was to convince Yeltsin of the need for direct communication with the public. This was a way to both go beyond mediated contact and supply raw material for circulation in the mass media. In one of their first meetings, Malashenko told Yeltsin the story of how George H. W. Bush had profited politically from his dropping in at a New Jersey flag factory during the 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis. Yeltsin needed scenes like that, Malashenko said, and would have to generate one headline per day that could be associated with him personally. “He grasped it at once,” Malashenko recalled. “I never had a reason to complain because, although his health was waning, he did incredible things. He made news every day.”92 It took several weeks for Yeltsin to grasp that he had to make contact locally and in the flesh. He wended his way through the Belgorod area south of Moscow in the first week of April and then through Krasnodar and Budënnovsk, the site of the 1995 terror incident, in mid-April. In Krasnodar Yeltsin stood behind a line of guards, with silent people kept at a distance. Malashenko and Chubais showed him photographs of the scene and contrasted it to his barnstorming in 1989–91. On his next field trip, to Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East (where he dropped in on his way to Beijing), Yeltsin hoofed it into the crowd and “it produced a whole different image.”93
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: