The Oligarchs (60 page)

Sergei Karaganov, deputy director of the Institute of Europe, also played a small role. Karaganov was one of the leading foreign policy analysts in Moscow. He served on the President's Council, a nearly defunct advisory panel to Yeltsin. The president paid heed when Karaganov wrote him a personal letter, warning that the West would not understand if he called off the election. Yeltsin would be isolated and cut off from the world.
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Finally, Dyachenko saw her father was “in the mood to take the final decision—a dangerous one, I fear.” She called the one man who
was fearless in the face of Yeltsin's immense power—Chubais, head of the analytical center and agent of the tycoons. She met Chubais at the Kremlin, took him into the president's reception room, and demanded a meeting with Papa. While Chubais waited outside, she went in and beseeched her father to listen to Chubais. “Papa said he did not want to listen to anyone. But he did not say that he had taken the final decision. I never kneeled in front of anybody, but here I was ready to fall to my knees and beg. Perhaps he sensed it,” she recalled. Yeltsin agreed to see Chubais, who entered the room, and Dyachenko left. Later she recalled hearing shouting through the door. Yeltsin recalled that Chubais was red-faced.

“Boris Nikolayevich,” Chubais began, “this is not 1993,” when Yeltsin had faced off against a violent, rebellious parliament. “The difference between that moment and now is that now, the one who goes beyond the constitutional boundaries will fail first. It doesn't matter that the Communists were the ones to go out of bounds back in 1993. It's a crazy idea to get rid of the Communists in this way. The Communist ideology is in people's heads. A presidential decree can't put new heads on people. When we build a normal, strong, wealthy country, only then will we put an end to Communism. The elections cannot be postponed.”

Yeltsin recalled they spoke for an hour. “I practically shouted, something I rarely do,” he said. “And finally, I reversed a decision I had
almost
made.”
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Chubais later recalled that at the end of the very heated argument, Yeltsin finally admitted it was wrong to postpone the elections. He turned to Chubais and said, “And you, Chubais, made many mistakes in privatization.”
²⁸

At about 5:00 P.M. on Sunday, a bomb threat was ostensibly made against the Duma. The building was evacuated and surrounded by interior troops. This was the first cue in the plan to dissolve the Duma by force. But just as they had come, the troops left. The order came: Pull back to the barracks. Yeltsin did not pull the trigger. He later attributed his decision to the arguments of Chubais and his daughter. Now he had to fight for reelection and for that, his friends, the oligarchs, were still at his side. But it would also mean that, as Malashenko had warned him, he would have to work for it.

Yeltsin had to break out of the “Kremlin Wall” syndrome. He had to persuade voters that he was not a distant tsar. A trip to Krasnodar in southern Russia, set up by the Soskovets campaign group, was, typically, a public relations disaster. Yeltsin barely got close to any voters and was surrounded by cordons of security men and local
chinnovniki
, the bureaucrats.

Although Yeltsin did not know it, Shakhnovsky, now working for the Chubais analytical center, had secretly sent photographers to Krasnodar. They captured the sight of Yeltsin, miles away from the voters. Shakhnovsky told me he compared the photos with earlier pictures shot in 1991, showing Yeltsin plunging into welcoming crowds. When Malashenko showed Yeltsin the two sets of photographs, the president got the message. “I almost yelped in pain,” Yeltsin said. “It made a strong impression on me. It had only been five years ago. I remembered how I felt back then when I met people and everything fell into place.”
²⁹

Yeltsin realized he needed to wage a “real” campaign and get closer to the voters. The first thing he did was remove Soskovets from the campaign and put Chubais in control. Shakhnovsky took over the scheduling and Yeltsin hit the road, visiting two dozen cities in four months. In a scene that became part of the campaign lore, Yeltsin, energized by applause from young people at a rock concert in Rostov-on-Don, playfully danced onstage.

Yeltsin tried to edge aside Grigory Yavlinsky, the centrist leader of the Yabloko party, who was also running.
³⁰
Yavlinsky refused to leave the race, but Yeltsin seized pride of place as the only real democratic and reform alternative to Zyuganov. Yeltsin's poll ratings began to climb into the teens in March, and by late April he was coming close to a neck-and-neck race with Zyuganov, who had crisscrossed the country with a droning, gloomy stump speech. On April 2 Yeltsin announced he was ordering the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya, and soon he signed an agreement in the Kremlin with Chechen resistance leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiev. Yeltsin also made a quick visit to an airfield near Grozny. Although his actions did not stop the fighting, they gave Yeltsin a public relations boost.

The tycoons injected a strange twist to the campaign on April 27 in an open letter published in Russian newspapers. The letter, expressing alarm about a schism in Russian society, appealed to the military, businessmen, politicians, and opinion makers “to pool their efforts in
searching for a political compromise,” although Yeltsin and Zyuganov were not specifically mentioned. The letter, written in cautious and even obfuscatory terms, was largely critical of the Communists and in retrospect appears to be a tactical warning from the tycoons to Zyuganov not to rip Russian society apart, even as they were ripping him apart. The implicit message to Zyuganov was to keep things calm or else. The letter was signed by thirteen financiers and industrialists, Berezovsky first, including the rest of the group of seven, who were committed Yeltsin backers. “It was a kind of warning to Zyuganov and Korzhakov,” Smolensky said. “We tried to get across the message that we shall slap anyone's hands if they try to break the democracy.” In other words, this is our election, don't mess with it.

Yeltsin's political operatives had Zyuganov in their sights, but first they had to sell Yeltsin himself, and that was extraordinarily difficult. Paul Bograd, a political consultant, prepared a detailed look at the polls, which he submitted on April 25 to Chubais. Drawing on eighteen months of data, Bograd found the voters in a foul mood. “Sixty-five percent of all voters want to vote against President Yeltsin,” he reported. “Sixty-five percent of voters do not want to vote for Zyuganov.” He added, “The winner will be the candidate whom voters do not vote against.”
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Put simply, this political math meant that Yeltsin's campaign had to make him the lesser of two evils by discrediting Zyuganov. They had to create a black-and-white choice, which was not simple given the strong negative feelings about Yeltsin. Oslon, the Yeltsin campaign pollster, told me that an added danger zone for Yeltsin was his health—if people saw he was frail, his support would crumble.

The kinder, gentler campaign for Yeltsin was born in a brainstorming session at Video International, one of the two major television advertising firms in Moscow at the time. The leader of the team was Mikhail Margelov, a strapping, worldly, ambitious young man who came from a family of military and intelligence officers. Margelov taught Arabic language at the KGB's Higher School, a training academy for spies, and later worked for the official news agency Tass. But in the 1990s he plunged into the capitalist pursuits of advertising and public relations. Video International made a pitch to the Chubais team on how to sell Boris Yeltsin to the skeptical Russian public. Margelov recalled, “Our starting point was, Yeltsin is president. He is ruling the country. He has made very many mistakes. People who
loved him in 1989–1990 do not love him now.”
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The result was a nationwide television advertising blitz in which Yeltsin did not appear, except in the very last spot. Instead, elderly people, veterans, and working-class voters offered soft and fuzzy testimonials for the Russian leader. Most of the subjects in the ads were closer to the profile of Communist supporters but said they were voting for Yeltsin. The theme of the spots was “Choose with Your Heart,” an attempt to open the door to votes for Yeltsin while sidestepping economics, crime, ideology, and thorny issues that might remind voters of why they disliked Yeltsin. Margelov recalled that he made one commercial showing a sailor promising to vote for Yeltsin, despite the fact he had not been paid in months. But the commercial was discarded at the last minute—no one would believe it.

Yeltsin was above the fray in his advertising, cast as the guarantor of stability, a father figure. “Maybe it sounds even idiotic to the Western mentality,” Margelov said of the “Choose with Your Heart” campaign slogan, “but for the Russian mentality it sounds quite natural.” Dyachenko brought Margelov a box of Yeltsin family photos. He selected some of the best, and they became the centerpiece of the final commercial in the set: Yeltsin narrating his own family history. Against sentimental music in the background, Yeltsin's voice reminisced about his mother's hotcakes, and the photos showed him as a young man, trim, with a thick pompadour of black hair—an athlete, a rebel, a father and grandfather. Finally, an older, puffy Yeltsin, seated in a beige chair and wearing an open-necked white shirt, came before the camera and offered sympathy for the pain his countrymen had felt in recent years. “Not a person in the country has had it easy,” he said. The closing slogan was, “We Trust, We Believe, We Hope.”

Alexei Levinson, a specialist in Western-style “focus groups,” using test groups to evaluate products or ads, told me such powerful television advertising appeared in Russia for the first time during the 1996 campaign. “For many Russians, advertising is a new thing, only two or three years old. There's hardly a kid who—like you in America—knew advertising from childhood. And for adults it is still something they are not accustomed to.

“Those who were least likely to vote for Yeltsin were over fifty, but they were also the most affected by commercials,” he said. “They were the most vulnerable to the commercials. They also hated them the most. It wasn't simple. The trick in the commercials was that the
people in them were 100 percent Zyuganov-type voters. You look at a person talking about the hardships of life, not necessarily linked to Communist rule, and all of a sudden he says, ‘Let's vote for Yeltsin.' It made a mishmash of their brains.”
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In Moscow, which had one of the most proreform electorates in the country, Luzhkov was a powerful engine for Yeltsin's reelection campaign. Luzhkov appeared on thousands of billboards around the city, shaking Yeltsin's hand in endorsement. He stood shoulder to shoulder with Yeltsin at a final concert in Red Square before the vote, leading the cheers. Yeltsin's natural base was among young people, and Lisovsky, who had begun his career staging concerts in Soviet times, approached MTV about an appearance by Yeltsin similar to the one President Clinton made in 1992. Back then, MTV staged a highly successful youth get-out-the-vote campaign called “Choose or Lose.” Clinton's appearance on MTV was rewarded by a strong showing among young voters. But this time MTV was nervous about Yeltsin's apparent weakness and refused to cooperate, giving Lisovsky three videocassettes of the Clinton appearance and telling him they wanted nothing to do with Yeltsin. Lisovsky modeled “Vote or Lose,” Yeltsin's youth campaign, on the MTV idea, including dozens of concerts across the country that spring. But the Yeltsin campaign concluded it was not enough to recast Yeltsin in soft focus. It was not enough for Yeltsin to dance on stage.

They had to destroy Zyuganov.

 

The front page of the newspaper held a startling photograph. Rations of sausage were curled on newspapers and set out on the floor. Everyone who saw the picture instantly recognized the scene from the past—the scramble for a piece of sausage, the lines, the shortages, the Soviet life. It was the sixth issue of a newspaper with a circulation of 10 million—more than twice that of Russia's best-selling weekly
Argumenty i Fakty
—that materialized in mailboxes and at public gathering places across Russia in April, May, and June 1996. In bold letters across the top, the newspaper was called
Ne Dai Bog!
(God forbid!), and it was one of the most successful tools in Yeltsin's negative campaign against Zyuganov.
Ne Dai Bog!
was an unrelenting, cleverly written crusade against Communism, and it was especially aimed at the provinces outside of Moscow, where Zyuganov was running
stronger than Yeltsin, and where the transition to the market economy had been the most difficult. Every issue of the paper carried biting articles, lavish color photos, and illustrations to drive home the message that Zyuganov would take the country backward. In the sixth issue, the front page carried a faked transcript of a supposed secret Communist Party meeting. “We blurted it out!” read the headline. “We will not be able to give the people anything that we promised.” In an earlier edition, featuring a children's essay contest, one child wrote: “Russia is my home, my fortress. But if Communists come to power—my coffin.”