84 Dobrokhotov, Ot Yel’tsina, 234–38.
85 Alessandra Stanley, “With Campaign Staff in Disarray, Yeltsin Depends on Perks of Office,” New York Times, May 13, 1996. Stanley wrote in another story (“A Media Campaign Most Russian and Most Unreal,” ibid., June 2, 1996) that the “indirection and goosebumpy emotional tug” of the ads recall General Electric advertising in the United States (“We bring good things to life”). Among the foreign consultants were Sir Tim Bell of the British firm Bell Pottinger (once a counselor to Margaret Thatcher), several media advisers to California governor Pete Wilson, and Richard Dresner, a former business partner of Dick Morris. See Kramer, “Rescuing Boris”; Sarah E. Mendelson, “Democracy Assistance and Political Transition in Russia,” International Security 25 (Spring 2001), 93–94; and Gerry Sussman, Global Electioneering: Campaign Consulting, Communications, and Corporate Financing (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 139–40.
86 Source: the survey data used in the writing of Colton, Transitional Citizens.
87 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 35. See Timothy J. Colton, “The Leadership Factor in the Russian Presidential Election of 1996,” in Anthony King, ed., Leaders’ Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 184–209.
88 In the survey (as detailed in Colton, Transitional Citizens), 2,456 Russians were interviewed in the weeks after the election runoff and were asked to rate Yeltsin and four of his defeated rivals as possessing or not possessing the five praiseworthy traits. Sixty-four percent reckoned Yeltsin to be intelligent and knowledgeable, 55 percent thought him to have a vision of the future, 45 percent deemed him strong, and 39 percent saw him as decent and trustworthy. Only 28 percent felt he really cared about people, dwarfed by the 63 percent who rejected this statement. Of respondents who thought the Russian economy was in good shape, 75 percent said Yeltsin cared about people like them; among those who thought the economy to be in bad or very bad shape, only 22 percent agreed. Among persons whose family finances had improved in the past year, 58 percent perceived the president as empathetic; that figure was down to 17 percent in the much larger group whose finances had deteriorated.
89 Daniel Treisman, “Why Yeltsin Won,” Foreign Affairs 75 (September–October 1996), 67. This article is the best analysis of what Treisman calls the Tammany Hall dimension of the campaign. As Treisman points out, the distribution of benefits preceded the main media campaign, which began only when Yeltsin had already drawn even with Zyuganov in the polls.
90 Baturin et al., Epokha, 569.
91 The regiment’s “elite soldiers, selected for their Slavic blond looks and sixfoot stature, were refitted with pre-revolutionary dress uniforms. Heavy on gold braid and peacock colors, the uniforms were designed by the Bolshoi Theater’s costume designers and are meant to evoke the martial splendor of imperial Russia.” Alessandra Stanley, “Stripped of Themes, Yeltsin Wraps Himself in Flag,” New York Times, April 19, 1996.
92 Malashenko interview. The visit was to the Annin Flag Company in Roseland, New Jersey, on September 19, 1988. Malashenko related it to me as having been made by Ronald Reagan, but it hardly matters which U.S. politician he ascribed the scene to in his conversation with Yeltsin.
93 Ibid.
94 Medvedev interview.
95 Lee Hockstader, “Invigorated Yeltsin Hits Hustings,” The Washington Post, June 1, 1996. The Yeltsin twist can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d90JtMP2J0Y.
96 Medvedev interview.
97 Alessandra Stanley, “Spendthrift Candidate Yeltsin: Miles to Go, Promises to Keep?” New York Times, May 4, 1996.
98 Quoted in Treisman, “Why Yeltsin Won,” 70.
99 In RFE/RL Newsline, May 27, 1996.
100 The quite unbelievable scene with Denisyuk is captured in Prezident vseya Rusi (The president of all Russia), documentary film by Yevgenii Kiselëv, 1999–2000 (copy supplied by Kiselëv), 4 parts, part 2. Yeltsin listens to her request and says, “OK, I will give you a car” (Ladno, podaryu mashinu). He kisses her on both cheeks and assures her that documentation will arrive with the machine. The car came through, and Denisyuk never complained.
101 Baturin et al., Epokha, 462.
102 Dobrokhotov, Ot Yel’tsina, 296.
103 Ibid., 489.
104 “Yeltsin’s earlier television spots were largely upbeat testimonials from average citizens, but those aired today were some of the harshest blasts of the campaign. The ads begin with short statements from Russian men and women saying they do not want to go back to communism; then the announcer, harking back to the Bolshevik Revolution, intones: ‘No one in 1917 thought there could be famine.’ Grainy black-and-white film shows starving children from Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture, which killed millions. Also pictured are Russians of the late 1970s lining up at stores whose shelves are empty. The tagline for this and other ads is: ‘And the communists didn’t even change their name. They won’t change their methods.’” David Hoffman, “Yeltsin, Communist Foe Launch TV Attack Ads,” The Washington Post, June 27, 1996.
105 In the transcript of an intercepted telephone conversation with her husband the morning of June 20, Tatyana is quoted as saying Russians had formed the impression that “these people [Korzhakov and his confrères] are governing the country and not he [Yeltsin].” A bit later, she converses with her mother about the president’s options and Naina Yeltsina warns, incorrectly, that Yeltsin would never remove Korzhakov. Aleksandr Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni (Yeltsin, the Kremlin, the history of an illness) (Moscow: OLMA, 2006), 392, 394.
106 Malashenko interview.
107 Yeltsin himself described the scene in Marafon, 45.
108 Moroz, 1996, 459–60.
109 Statistical details here taken from the survey data used in Colton, Transitional Citizens. The big change after June 16 was the shift of Lebed voters toward Yeltsin. Oslon’s polls as late as the first week of June showed only 27 percent of Lebed supporters intending to support the president in a second round. FOM, Rezul’taty, June 13, 1996, 1.
110 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 48.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1 Korzhakov in his memoirs counts the June 26 attack as Yeltsin’s fifth, but this includes September 29–30, 1994, when Yeltsin was a no-show for the meeting with Albert Reynolds in Ireland. Most of the medical experts do not classify that event as a full-flown myocardial infarction. Aleksandr Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni (Yeltsin, the Kremlin, the history of an illness) (Moscow: OLMA, 2006), 405–6, gets to five by counting the incident in Kaliningrad on June 23 as a separate heart attack. The physician Vladlen Vtorushin is cited as the source of this information.
2 The text of the letter is in Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk) (Moscow: Interbuk, 1997), 451 (italics added). Yeltsin reproduced it in Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 49, saying that Korzhakov “did not conceal” the content of the letter but several times told Tatyana Dyachenko “that if something happened to me she would be guilty.”