RUSSIA: The Morning After The Celebration Night Before

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Analysis Sergei Strokan and Alexei Elmanov

MOSCOW, Jul 5 1996 (IPS) - Boris Yeltsin’s presidential campaign triumph was clear, but plenty of people have been pointing out that their willingness to give him their vote does not imply automatic support for all he has done in the past — or all he may do in the future.

The media — who played a key role in Yeltsin’s triumph by flooding their airwaves with his propaganda — spread a brief wave of euphoria across the country from the moment news started breaking of his victory from the Federation’s far eastern provinces, 8,000 kilometres from Moscow.

The anchormen and women of the five major Russian TV channels, who worked until 3.30 AM on updated election news, became visibly happier as the long day rolled on into a long night of celebration. “I yearn to leave and join you, it’s so dreary and dull here,” said a Channel 4 correspondent posted to cover the campaign HQ of defeated communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov.

Of course the morning after the party was grim. Russians woke to find the same old problems: mounting budget deficits, the threat of runaway inflation, the continuing drop in industrial production and the widening gap between rich and poor.

“A lot of people here voted for Yeltsin not because they love him, but because there is no one other, besides Zyuganov,” a construction engineer in a village outside Moscow said. “Four years into reforms and Yeltsin has only now began to care about people. And life is passing by.”

“The euphoria over Yeltsin’s victory among democrats must give way to reminding the president of mistakes his team have made and action to correct the reforms’ course,” prominent democratic activist Yelena Bonner and widow of ‘father of reform’ Andrei Sakharov, told the independent Interfax news agency.

Yet in purely political terms Yeltsin’s success was formidable. “He not only carried large industrial cities including those with collapsed military industries but destroyed the myth of the ‘Red Belt’.” noted the daily Segodnya. “That string of Southern and Central Russia agrarian regions — old stronghold of the Communists — mostly voted against going back on reforms.”

There were mundane reasons for this. Aside from the media sweep, by hiring Alexander Lebed, third place in the first election round, as Security Council chief and hinting at alliance with fourth placed liberal economist Grigory Yavlinsky, Yeltsin bought up most of their voters for the second round.

But that aside, it was hard to take the personal triumph of Wednesday away from Yeltsin.

“I really can’t fully understand how he managed to do it,” said Yuri Bunin, director of the Moscow-based Political Technologies’ Center told IPS. “Last December his approval rating stood at a meagre four percent, and Zyuganov led in all polls before the first round and the run-off.

“It should be practically impossible for a man presiding over the break-up of the USSR and painful reforms, which has left deep emotional bruises in the minds of most Russians, to resurrect himself, but he did it”.

Part of the explanation lies in the organisation of Yeltsin’s electoral campaign, which for all the advantages granted by its open access to the state media, was unanimously hailed as the first really professional one ever staged in Russia.

But others commented on Yeltsin’s own temperament, as a man who seems to thrive on a crisis and can seize the moment amid madness — as he did in 1991 in his stand against the August coup plotters.

“In January after the dismal affair of hostage-taking by Chechen guerrillas in Pervomayskoye I was sure Yeltsin was being manipulated and could not recover,” said the head of the Democratic Russia party and one-time premier Yegor Gaidar. “Now he resembles his own fighting self of 1991.”

Despite the constant speculation about his health, his two heart attacks and his heroic drinking, Yeltsin fully used the last few months before the vote to present himself as a confident and alert statesman, a defender of national interests and a natural-born wielder of power — a trait that Russians traditionally respect.

In the last month he has signed dozens of decrees, disbursing billions of roubles in delayed pensions and wages to state-sector workers as well as cheap credits to individual enterprises.

By undertaking gruelling tours of the country and deploying Western back-slapping and baby-kissing election techniques he largely restored his old image of a ‘man of the people’, an emotional link with the electorate broken by his aloofness and frequent disappearances from public life over the past four years.

Another key was the mobilisation of the hitherto politically apathetic youth vote. A road show of top Russian pop talent toured the country under the slogan ‘Vote Or Lose’, carrying the pro- Yeltsin message to hundreds of thousands in packed concert arenas.

Though reaching some bizarre levels — it ended on the eve of the run off with a ‘Miss Fatty’ beauty contest celebrating traditional wholesome Russian buxomness — it hit the spot. ‘Flying squads’ of young Yeltsin supporters coaxed out the voters in a poll where turnout was everything to the incumbent.

There were claims and counter-claims of election abuse. Yeltsin advisor Georgi Satarov claimed there were “stark violations of the law” in the Red Belt on Jun. 16 and accused communist supporters of stuffing ballot boxes with doctored polling papers.

In reply Zyuganov cited the coverage given Yeltsin by the media, which, as some Western journalists put it, “abandoned any pretence of objectivity and jumped on Yeltsin’s bandwagon”.

Yeltsin’s campaign staff disbursed cash freely among Russian journalists in exchange for favourable stories. “I got about 1,000 dollars for publishing articles on repression’s during Stalin’s time,” a reporter with one of Moscow’s leading dailies told IPS on condition of anonymity. “But I never lied. Those horrible things really happened, and I would have been reminding people of the inherent baseness of the Communist doctrine anyway, so, why not take the money, if it’s for a good deed”.

Happily for that reporter’s bank balance, anti-communism became the main theme of the president’s election drive after Jun. 16, sidelining the country’s economic issues and the war in Chechnya — an end to which had been Yeltsin’s chief promise in May.

And while it secured him the Kremlin for the second term, it is in both these issues that the real pitfalls lie in the weeks to come and where skillful campaign techniques won’t work.

If Yeltsin is unable to reverse the economic situation swiftly the communists, who have acquired a new legitimacy in the elections as the principal opposition force, may surge again. The communists read their defeat as a stamp of support from a clear 20 percent of the country. “We will accept any results calmly and continue to do our work,” said top party official Anatoly Lukyanov.

“Judging by their rather calm reaction to the poll results, the Communists apparently plan to follow a simple strategy of lying low,” says independent Moscow political analyst Alexander Kakotkin. “They clearly consider that Yeltsin will eventually lead the country into such conditions that they will come to power again — and for a long time.

“They expect that the economic crisis will lead the communist- dominated parliament to rise against the president by September or October, when the keeping of new pre-election spending pledges will fire inflation,” he added. “And an attempt to seize power by force should also not be ruled out.”

Yeltsin’s future performance largely depends on who gets into his new cabinet after the present government resigns by law.

Although Yeltsin has already asked current premier Viktor Chernomyrdin to present plans for a new cabinet within a fortnight, there is widespread talk about the need for a coalition government.

While the Kremlin currently rejects the idea of forming such government on a party-sharing basis, it is welcoming “any real professionals who care about work and not their politics,” as Sergei Filatov, chief of Yeltsin’s campaign HQ put it.

“The president has now a unique chance to form a truly liberal government and to speed up the radical reforms needed to pull the country out of crisis,” democratic independent MP Galina Starovoitova told IPS.

But the prospects for a purely reformist government are complicated by the formidable presence of Lebed, a fierce nationalist who bears a traditionalist old soldier’s ‘brass head’ on a young man’s body.

After handing over his voter support to Yeltsin and rewarded with authority over the entire military and civilian security apparatus, Lebed now lays claim to a role in the political and economic sphere as vice-president.

Vowing to fight crime and corruption an interview with the Nezavisimaya Gazeta he called for more state control over the economy, although “in the strictly limited capacity of guarantor of stability”.

He also made an unelaborated call for “punitive nationalisation” as well as “strict control over all external economic relations and price setting in the state sector”.

Yeltsin is looking to potential foreign private investment to the tune of five billion U.S. dollars a year to dull the effects of structural industrial reform.

It could put off these potential investors, never mind the effects such policies would have on the willingness of the international financing institutions to underwrite the national bank balance.