RUSSIA: Russia's Democratic Election

▪ 1997

      When campaigning opened at the beginning of 1996, Pres. Boris Yeltsin's popularity was close to zero. He himself did not at first want to run, since he had spent several months in 1995 convalescing after two heart attacks. Panic struck the Yeltsin team when opinion polls indicated that Yeltsin could not win; members of his staff urged him to find a pretext to cancel the election.

      Instead, Yeltsin changed his team, assigning a key role to his daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, and appointing staunchly pro-capitalist Anatoly Chubais campaign manager. Chubais recruited a team of six leading Russian financiers and media moguls, who bankrolled the campaign to the tune of $3 million and guaranteed favourable coverage on television and in leading newspapers. In the outlying regions of the country, the Yeltsin campaign relied for support on local governors, most of whom had been appointed by the president.

      The campaign of Gennady Zyuganov, the candidate of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, had a strong grass roots organization, particularly in rural areas and small towns, but it had nothing like the financial resources that the Yeltsin campaign could command.

      Yeltsin threw himself into the campaign, stumping the country, dancing at rock concerts, exploiting all the advantages of the incumbent to maintain a high media profile. He vowed to abandon unpopular policies and increase welfare spending, end the war in Chechnya, pay wage and pension arrears, and abolish military conscription. His advertising campaign was fiercely anticommunist, playing up the threat of “civil war” and recalling the lean years following the 1917 revolution, with pictures of starving children and destroyed churches.

      There were several attractive democratic candidates, notably the economist Grigory Yavlinsky. Seeing these candidates as a threat, the Yeltsin campaign worked to polarize the debate—to exclude the middle ground—and convince voters that only Yeltsin could defeat the Communist menace. The election soon became a two-horse race, but Zyuganov, who lacked Yeltsin's charisma and fought a lacklustre campaign, watched helplessly as his strong initial lead was whittled away.

      Voter turnout in the first round on June 16 was 69.8%. Yeltsin won 35.3% of the vote; Zyuganov 32%; Aleksandr Lebed, the mercurial ex-general, an unexpectedly high 14.5%; Grigory Yavlinsky 7.3%; far-right Russian nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky 5.7%; and former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev 0.5%. With no candidate securing an absolute majority, Yeltsin and Zyuganov went into a second round of voting. In the meantime, Yeltsin cleverly annexed a large section of the voters by appointing Lebed to the posts of national security adviser and secretary of the Security Council.

      His election tactics paid off. In the second round on July 3, with a turnout of 68.9%, Yeltsin won 53.8% of the vote and Zyuganov 40.3%, with 4.8% voting against both candidates. Moscow and St. Petersburg together provided over half of Yeltsin's support, but he also did well in large cities in the Urals and in the north and northeast. He lost in the traditional “red belt” in the south, but the Communists did not improve on the one-third of the national vote that they had commanded since 1991.

      Many people sided with Yeltsin not because they liked his politics but because they liked the Communists even less and did not want to turn the clock back to the past. In addition, they voted for Yeltsin because he promised to abandon his government's unpopular austerity policies and increase public spending to help those suffering from the pain of economic reform. Within a month of the election, Yeltsin had issued a decree canceling almost all these promises. (ELIZABETH TEAGUE)

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