53 Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy, 402. Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001), 513, write of the incident: “Contrary to all the wishful thinking in the West about Russian democracy, ‘Tsar Boris’ had no qualms about throwing the constitution out the window.” But he did have such qualms, and he did act on them.
54 Aleksandr Oslon, interview with the author (January 25, 2001). Tatyana’s older sister, Yelena Okulova, played a minor advisory role in helping to arrange Naina Yeltsina’s campaign schedule.
55 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 361–69. According to Korzhakov, Chernomyrdin offered to take up the suggestion with Yeltsin; there is no record of him having done so. Korzhakov says that without Chernomyrdin’s permission he taped the conversation, which lasted from seven P.M. until almost two A.M., and that the quotations are “almost verbatim” from the transcript.
56 Second Yeltsina interview.
57 David Hoffman, “Yeltsin Vows No Delays in Election,” The Washington Post, May 7, 1996. Korzhakov gave the interview to the British newspaper The Observer. It quickly circulated in Russia.
58 Oslon interview.
59 Dobrokhotov, Ot Yel’tsina, 165–69.
60 An eleventh candidate, Aman-Geldy Tuleyev, the governor of Kemerovo province in west Siberia, withdrew on June 5 and threw his support to Zyuganov.
61 Lebed had climbed in the Russian polls shortly after retiring from the army in May 1995. He ran for the Duma in December 1995 on the list of the Congress of Russian Communities, a nationalist organization formed by Yurii Skokov, and was elected in a district in Tula province.
62 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 363.
63 McFaul, Russia’s 1996 Presidential Election, 25–26, 109; Baturin et al., Epokha, 571.
64 Grigorii Yavlinskii, second interview with the author (September 28, 2001). Yavlinskii’s demands were contained in a letter to Yeltsin published in Izvestiya and Nezavisimaya gazeta on May 18. Korzhakov told Chernomyrdin in mid-April of a conversation Yavlinskii had a few days before with the former vice president of the United States, Dan Quayle—a conversation we must assumed was taped by officers of Korzhakov’s guard unit. Yavlinskii is said to have remarked that Zyuganov was his enemy while Yeltsin was a relative, “But you will understand that sometimes a relative is worse than any enemy.” Quayle is said to have answered, “I understand.” Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 366–67.
65 The Korzhakov-Soskovets group also put an oar in. According to Korzhakov (Boris Yel’tsin, 364), Nikolai Yegorov summoned governors to his office in Moscow and “battled in the localities” with holdouts.
66 Igor Malashenko, interview with the author (March 18, 2001).
67 Sara Oates and Laura Roselle, “Russian Elections and TV News: Comparison of Campaign News on State-Controlled and Commercial Television Channels,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 5 (Spring 2000), 40–41. Korzhakov and his Presidential Security Service complained throughout the campaign that NTV was continuing to criticize the Chechen war, and implicitly Yeltsin’s leadership of it, and to refer to Korzhakov and his group as “the party of war.” See Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata; poslesloviye (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk; epilogue) (Moscow: Detektiv-press, 2004), 420–21.
68 Our Home Is Russia got 18 percent of the mentions on the ORT nightly news (Oates and Roselle, “Russian Elections and TV News,” 38) but only 10 percent of the popular vote. The KPRF got 13 percent of the mentions and 23 percent of the votes. Russia’s Democratic Choice, the liberal party headed by Gaidar, got 12 percent of the mentions and 4 percent of the popular vote.
69 Timothy J. Colton, Transitional Citizens: Voters and What Influences Them in the New Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 61.
70 FOM (Fond “Obshchestvennoye mneniye”), Rezul’taty sotsiologicheskikh issledovanii (Results of sociological research), June 13, 1996, 1. The complete run of this in-house bulletin of Aleksandr Oslon’s Public Opinion Foundation was supplied to the author by Oslon.
71 See Ellen Mickiewiecz, Changing Channels: Television and the Struggle for Power in Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 178–84. Even on NTV, though, news anchors opined in the final weeks of the first-round campaign, and reporters subjected Zyuganov’s promises and claims to searching questioning while largely sparing Yeltsin.
72 FOM, Rezul’taty, June 19, 1996, 1. Surveys by the VTsIOM group show a similar trend. See Stephen White, Richard Rose, and Ian McAllister, How Russia Votes (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1997), 258. VTsIOM data show Yeltsin fifth among intended voters in the second half of January, behind Zyuganov, Lebed, Yavlinskii, and Zhirinovskii.
73 Yeltsin led Zyuganov among individuals thirty-five and younger from the beginning; he overtook Zyuganov among persons aged thirty-six to forty-five on April 21, among those forty-six to fifty-five on May 18, and among those older than fifty-five on June 1. He surpassed Zyuganov in March in Moscow and St. Petersburg, in early April in cities of over 1 million in population, in mid-May in other cities and towns, and in the villages of Russia in the first half of June. He won majority support among men and women at about the same time. Poorly educated and low-paid Russians rallied to Yeltsin, and by a narrow margin, only in June; those with a college-level diploma and higher incomes were on his side from the start. FOM, Rezul’taty, June 19, 1996, 1–3.
74 Talbott, Russia Hand, 161–62; Goldgeier and McFaul, Power and Purpose, 196–97. The request had been made by Russian diplomats before Yeltsin discussed it with Clinton in May 1995. Yeltsin first tried to sell Clinton on a delay until after the two of them left office at the end of the decade.
75 Mikhail Rostovskii, “Mutatsiya klana” (Mutation of the clan), Moskovskii komsomolets, December 3, 2002 (citing a conversation with Korzhakov).
76 Talbott, Russia Hand, 202, 204. Clinton was furious when Yeltsin lectured him in front of the press for the excesses of American foreign policy and Yeltsin left the room before Clinton could reply.
77 Alan Friedman, “James D. Wolfensohn: World Bank and Russian Reform,” International Herald Tribune, May 27, 1996.
78 Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy, 407.
79 Baturin et al., Epokha, 658.
80 The revelations about the assassination threat and the white lie to his wife are in “Boris Nemtsov—Yevgenii Al’bats o Yel’tsine” (Boris Nemtsov to Yevgeniya Al’bats about Yeltsin), Novoye vremya/New Times, April 30, 2007.
81 FOM, Rezul’taty, June 5, 1996, 3. Earlier polls had shown that Chechnya was the single biggest strike against Yeltsin in public opinion and that 70 percent of citizens favored either a pullout or a cessation of hostilities without a pullout.
82 Ibid., April 22, 1996, 2.
83 Ibid., May 10, 1996, 2 (italics added). The bifurcation or polarization gambit is well drawn in McFaul, Russia’s 1996 Presidential Election; and Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), chap. 13.