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
Tret’yakov’s editorial came out on May 7. Seventy-five million participating voters had their say on Sunday, June 16. Yeltsin took 26,665,495 votes. It was some 19 million fewer than he had received in 1991 but still put him in first place, with 36 percent of the ballots. Zyuganov had 32 percent, Lebed 15 percent, Yavlinskii 7 percent, and Zhirinovskii 6 percent. Everyone else trailed with less than 1 percent. In his final indignity at Yeltsin’s hands, Mikhail Gorbachev took one-half of 1 percent—386,069 votes. While bleeding strength compared to 1991 in every macroregion of Russia, Yeltsin carried forty-six of the provinces and Zyuganov forty-three. Yeltsin did better than average in the northern and northwestern sections of European Russia, Moscow, the Urals, and Siberia; he was weakest in the red belt south of Moscow and in the North Caucasus.
And so Yeltsin and Zyuganov found themselves in a sudden-death second round, with voting to occur on Wednesday, July 3, a workday. The strategy of the Yeltsin camp, aided by the electoral format, was simple—to distill everything to the toggle choice of forward on the historical continuum or backward. At the level of tactics, it dichotomized the decision as expertly as a fisherman filleting a trout. The choice could not be clearer, he stated on June 17. “Either back, to revolutions and turmoil, or ahead, to stability and prosperity.”103 National television obliged by airing documentaries about the Gulag, the hounding of dissidents, and economic stagnation under the Soviets.104
Two political melodramas unfolded overtly in the seventeen days between ballots. On June 18, as agreed in May, the third-finishing Aleksandr Lebed issued a statement endorsing Yeltsin. The price had gone up, as he was offered and accepted the position of secretary of the Security Council and assistant to the president for national security. Yeltsin relatedly dismissed his defense minister, Pavel Grachëv, who had once been Lebed’s commanding officer, and replaced him several weeks later with Igor Rodionov, an older general in whom Lebed had confidence. On June 20 a funding scandal pushed relations between Yeltsin and the clique around Aleksandr Korzhakov to the breaking point. The day before, officers in Korzhakov’s guard service had arrested Sergei Lisovskii and Arkadii Yevstaf’ev, two staffers to the Chubais team, on the steps of the White House and confiscated a half-million dollars in cash that was part of the funding stream for the campaign. When Chubais and Tatyana Dyachenko intervened, Yeltsin fired Korzhakov, Oleg Soskovets, and Mikhail Barsukov, a move that accented his decisiveness and innovativeness.105