How Yeltsin stole the election
Six months before Russia's presidential elections, polls gave
Boris Yeltsin an approval rating of around 5% and a negative rating of 80%. (Time, May 27, 1996 p.31) Two-thirds of the population believed he was corrupt and had ruined the economy. Liberals were urging him not to run again, to leave the field to someone who had a chance. Even a month before the first round in June, well-informed, sober Russian leftists were convinced Yeltsin could not win. But they were equally certain he would not relinquish power. David Mandel-Seppo explores the corrupt machinery of Russian power-politics, and identifies the real decision-makers in the transitional society.
Even by purely formal liberal standards, these were grossly unfair elections. Incumbency usually offers some advantage, but Yeltsin was no ordinary incumbent. As a result of his bloody coup d'Etat of October 1993, he became an autocrat, free of effective oversight or control.
He made good use of this arbitrary power in his electoral campaign, which was marked by numerous gross legal violations, including the diversion of public facilities, personnel and money. Yeltsin disbursed (or at least promised) state funds freely to bolster his popularity. He gave away an unplanned $11 billion US in everything from tax breaks to enterprises to a cultural centre for Muslims, from writing-off farm debts to a veterans home and a telephone for a pensioner. His formal campaign expenditures also greatly surpassed the $3 million spending limit.
Genadii Zyuganov, candidate of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), would have been crucified for even the smallest infraction.
Another advantage was an overwhelmingly and unashamedly biased press in Yeltsin's favour, especially television, on which most Russians now rely exclusively, newspapers having become a luxury item. But even the vast majority of the printed press was blatantly slanted toward Yeltsin and against Zyuganov. As a result, ordinary citizens had very limited access to objective information about the candidates. The monitoring team of the European Institute for
Media found in the two weeks separating the first and second rounds that Yeltsin scored
247 positive mentions in the electronic media as opposed to Zyuganov's 240 negative points. (OMRI, July 9, 1996)
The press's attitude resulted from a combination of ideological affinity to Yeltsin, state administrative and financial pressures
(two television channels are state-owned, and the head of the third was a member of
Yeltsin's campaign team), as well as outright bribes to journalists. $100,000 was paid out each month to journalists in Moscow alone.
(Washington Post, June 30, 1996).
Apart from the backing of the new
Russian bourgeoisie, Yeltsin enjoyed strong political and financial support from the major capitalist states. Yeltsin's illegal American campaign or Clinton's likening the state terrorism against the Chechen people to the
American civil war might not have been much real use to Yeltsin, but Western money undoubtedly played a significant role in the campaign. This took the form of the IMF's
$10+ billion U.S. three-year loan (the fund's second biggest ever, after the recent loan to Mexico, which was granted in February, on the strong urging of the U.S. government. France and Germany followed in April with $400 million and $2.7 billion respectively.
Most remarkable about this money, apart from its timing, was that contrary to IMF rules and traditions, it was made conditional on the government meeting strict economic targets (not so far, at least). An agreement stipulating conditions was indeed signed, but Yeltsin issued no decree making this package binding on the spending ministries. IMF officials said and did nothing, even when the budget deficit began to exceeded agreed levels and structural reforms were placed on hold. (The Economist, 13 July 1996, p. 71.) "If you think rationally, Yeltsin didn't have a chance. He has wrecked the reforms. His physical condition is awful. He started the war in Chechnya. He hasn't kept a single promise. Instead of a personnel policy there is a personnel merry-go-round. He has given society no clear prospect. In other words, Yeltsin lacks everything that is valued in a human being and a politician."
Genadii Zyuganov, Communist Party (KPRF) candidate (Sovetskaya Rossiya, 11 July, 1996)
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Direct intimidation of voters by the Yeltsin side also played a role in the outcome. Presidential appointees in the regions were led to understand that their jobs were at stake if Yeltsin did not come out ahead. In most cases, local officials merely had to ensure a high electoral turnout, since this generally favoured Yeltsin's chances. (Those who felt uncomfortable with both choices were more likely to support Yeltsin, if they voted.) This was achieved by various methods, from providing free public transport (including suburban trains to entice city dwellers back from their cottages and garden plots) to tree lotteries and prizes for voters. But in the "red belt regions, where a highes turnout favoured Zyuganov, less innocuous methods were used. According to a Yeltsin advisor, 8000 Yeltsin supporters descended upon polling stations in villages in southern Russia, challenging voter documents, and even calling in the police. They were thus able to intimidate potential voters and depress the turnout. (Washington Post, July 4, 1996)
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Outright fraud also had its place. In Chechnya the falsification was so obvious (74% voted, of which 73% for Yeltsin), that even liberal newspapers omitted the results from their tabulations. In Kalmykiya, a depressed rural region in the southern red belt, official returns gave Yeltsin 69% to Zyuganov's 27%. Eyewitnesses charged that votes for Zyuganov were counted as Yeltsin votes on a large scale. (OMRI, July 18, 1996). Fraud has been alleged in several national-minority republics, where the pro-Yeltsin vote increased from the first to second rounds by far more than the combined first round votes of Lebed and Yavlinskii, candidates who transferred support to Yeltsin in round two. In Tatarstan, for example, the second round yielded the highly suspect result of 63.97% for Yeltsin and 30.1% for Zyuganov; whereas the first round gave Zyuganov 38.9% to Yeltsin's 37.34%. (Segodnya, July 5, 1996 and Moscow Tribune, July 6, 1996).
An analyst for the Central Electoral Commission attributed these shifts to Moscow's ability to influence the local elites between the rounds. (OMRI, July 8, 1996) But this does not explain how these elites were influenced and how they in turn were able to influence the voting result. This is something that will probably never be known with certainty, since the Central Electoral Commission, headed by Yeltsin supporter N. Ryabov, is, in practice, responsible only to Yeltsin. But to take one example, the Krasnoyarsk region, the heads of the government administration of the various territorial levels met several times during the campaign to set tasks in connection with guaranteeing a Yeltsin victory. (He received 53% here). Meanwhile, over half of the members of the region's electoral commissions were officials in these administrations, and so Yeltsin subordinates. (Segodnya, July 9, 1996.)
L. Radzikhovskii, a liberal journalist, gave the following candid, if cynical,
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evaluation of the role of media bias in Yeltsin's victory. But his evaluation can be extended to all the unfair aspects of the campaign.
"There are two ways to influence the electorate. There was the way of force, and there was the way of Malashenko [head of the private NTV channel, who was a leading member of Yeltsin's campaign team]. In essence, Malashenko's way saved hundreds of lives that might have been lost to the tanks and guns that would have been used in the cancellation of the elections. [...] It's true that in a truly fair election [Yeltsin] might have lost. He violated various rules in the end. So call it the softer variant of what might have been. Yeltsin plays cards only when he knows he can be a winner. He always requires a fifth ace up his sleeve. Otherwise he'll take out his Smith & Wesson [revolver] and start firing. In the election, Malashenko played the role of the fifth ace. Let's at least praise Malashenko for that." (D. Remnick, "Yeltsin to the Brink and Back," New Yorker, July 15, 1996, pp. 49-50.)
Yeltsin repeatedly told his aides that he would not let the Communists take power. even if they won a majority. (ibid.) He said as much even in public, though in slightly more ambiguous terms. No sober observer could doubt his seriousness. Campaign promises
One cannot say with any certainty whether Zyuganov would have won in reasonably fair elections. However, in several countries of Eastern Europe successor parties to the Communists have won elections, and none of these has national roots as strong as the KPRF. On the other hand, the Yeltsin regime has brought so much hardship to the great majority of people, he has lied so often and murdered innocents (October 1993 and Chechnya), he was viewed so negatively by so many at the start of the campaign, that it could be argued that Zyuganov should have been able to overcome almost any amount of unfairness. A complete explanation of the electoral outcome requires, therefore, that one also look at the content of the two campaigns.
The real battle was for the approximately 50% of the voters who in the December 1995 Duma elections supported neither liberal candidates, who received about 22% the voting according to electoral list, nor the who received about 28%. These were people dissatisfied with "shock therapy" and other aspects of the Yeltsin regime but unwilling to vote for the Communists or related groups. Instead they supported a variety of
"centrist" parties, none of which won more that a few per cent.
Yeltsin based his campaign on the calculation that if these voters were made to perceive the choice as one between two evils, they would opt for the evil that they already knew, especially if he offered some hope that he was changing his ways. To this end. Yeltsin adopted a three-prong strategy.
On the one hand, his propaganda played on tears that a Zyuganov victory would bring back the worst features of the Communist past. At the same time, it exacerbated the voters' already deep sense of insecurity, arguing that any attempts to undo the struc tural reforms he had made, however, unjust and distasteful they were, would lead to even more suffering and injustice and even provoke a civil war.
The other thrust of Yeltsin's campaign was to show the voters that he was indeed changing his policies of the last years. Thus, he concluded a cease-fire in Chechnya and flew there to announce that the war was over. He gave signs of a abandoning "shock therapy" for a more "socially-oriented" policy: increased social allocations, payment of back wages (at least in the state sector) and pensions, the beginning of compensation for lost savings, state supports and tax credits for industry and agriculture. In January, he publicly criticized and dismissed Anatolii Chubais, the head of privatization, viewed by the mass of Russians as a gigantic swindle. Yeltsin even spoke of reviewing some of the cases of privatization. The person who had been most responsible for dismantling the Soviet Union, a very unpopular move with many Russians, signed a treaty for a confederal union with Belarus and closer ties with a number of other former Soviet republics. In an appeal to Soviet and greatpower nationalism, he reintroduced the Victory Day military parade (May 9) and, surrounded by red flags, even addressed the assembled veterans from the top of Lenin's tomb as "comrades.". The man who had proposed replacing May Day with Easter as a national holiday now addressed the tradeunion's May Day rally. In an appeal to youth, he promised to end conscription by the year 2000, after having earlier abolished student military deferrals and lengthened service from 1s to 24 months. And so it went.
Since many of these changes were more symbolic than real and they came so suddenly before the elections, one would normally have expected the citizenry to react with cynicism. But Yeltsin counted on the "centrist" voters' fear of the Communists and of new social and political upheavals, which would make them want to believe, even if it went against their common sense.
The third prong of Yeltsin's strategy was to enlist former general Lebed, a nationalist, law-and-order, "tough" , "centrist" candidate, to draw off a part of the opposition vote that would otherwise have gone mainly to the Zyuganov in the second round. In the Duma elections, Lebed's party won only 4% of the vote, and observers wrote him off as a non-starter. But in March, the Yeltsin camp began lending advisers and pouring money into Lebed's. Suddenly, he was a familiar presence on television, whereas Zyuganov barely got any coverage, and little of that was positive. In the first round, Lebed received 15% of the vote. Yeltsin immediately put him in charge of the state repressive apparatuses and declared a war on corruption. In the second round, most of the Lebed voters did, in fact, support Yeltsin.
Until recently, this had been extreme right nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovskii's role, but buffoonery and repeated support for
Yeltsin on critical issues had caused his star to fade. (Zhirinovskii called on his voters to vote "against Zyuganov" in the second
Zyuganov's campaign
Zyuganov's economic platform was traditional social-democracy: capitalism, but with a strong state sector, much social spending, protection of the domestic market and support for industry. The great majority of the population should normally have found this programme an attractive alternative to "shock therapy". (One can ask if Zyuganov would have been able in practice to carry out this programme any more than his EasternEuropean counterparts. On the other hand, the size and potential strength of the Russian economy and state would have given him somewhat more leeway.) However, several aspects of Zyuganov's campaign played directly into Yeltsin's strategy. The main one was his failure to give a central place to the issue of democracy, that is, to popular control over state policy and administration. This would have made him much more attractive and credible to "centrist" voters. Instead, he promised vaguely to abolish the autocratic presidential regime in two or three years. His position on Chechnya was ambiguous, and he did not recognize Chechenya's right to
But even if Zyuganov had taken up the cause of democracy, his efforts would not have been credible as long as the KPRF failed publicly to came to terms with Russia's Stalinist past. But this failure is closely linked to Zyuganov's strong, sometimes mystical, emphasis of patriotic themes at the expense of socialism, which leads him to emphasize continuity, rather than a break, with the past. In a 1995 book, he praises Stalin for transforming Soviet ideology along patriotic lines after the war (1945-53 was, in fact, a period of extreme official xenophobia and GreatRussian chauvinism, not to mention the waves of terror!) and he criticizes Khrushchev's de-stalinization for reversing this pat-
Gennadi Zyuganov, Communist Party (KPFR) candidate, votes in Moscow riotic trend. (Za gorizonton, Moscow, 1995,
Pursuing this nationalist line, Zyuganov forged a "national-patriotic" coalition which included such unsavoury elements as Viktor Anpilov, leader of Toiling Russia, whose views sometimes seem closer to fascism than to socialism. This, of course, put wind in the sails of Yeltsin's anti-Communist campaign.
Various observers noted the rather lacklustre, even seemingly half-hearted nature of Zyuganov's campaign, especially during the two-week interval between the first and second rounds, and wondered if Zyuganov, in fact, wanted to win. While Yeltsin overspent the legal limit by many millions, Zyuganov spent slightly less than half the limit. (After the defeat, he explained that this money was saved for the coming regional elections.) (OMRI, July 24, 1996.) Before the second round, he even proposed a coalition government with Yeltsin forces, something that lent support to the idea that Yeltsin really had changed.
Zyuganov possibly did not want to win. After all, any realistic observer knew that Yeltsin would do anything to hold onto power and that a yuganov victory would mean an end of Zyuganov's political career and possibly of the KPRF. This points to the most basic shortcoming of Zyuganov's campaign. For there was only one way to overcome Yeltsin's unfair advantage and at the same time survive politically: Zyuganov had to use the electoral campaign to build a mass movement for democracy, for popular living standards and social rights.
But although the KPRF has a membership hundreds of thousands, many of whom went door-to-door, the party itself is a bureaucratized structure in which the rank-and-file have little direct influence. Nor has the party made any systematic attempt to involve itself in the day-to-day struggles of workers and other victims of shock therapy. It did not make significant use of its predominant position in the Duma following the December elections to publicize and support these struggles. Instead, the high point of its opposition work was the symbolic denunciation of the dismantling of the USSR. The working class
So why has the "patriotic" KPRF become the main opposition force in Russian society? And why have all attempts to build a democratic, socialist movement, as a popular alternative to Yeltsinism, failed. Ultimately, the answer lies in the weakness of the working class, the objective core of any democratic alternative.
To a certain degree, this weakness can be attributed to a failure of leadership. But only in the sense that leadership, in one way or another, reflects the state of the base, which at present is demoralized and quite passive. The relationship between the leadership and the base is a dialectical one, itself conditioned by the objective economic situation. (For a more detailed analysis, see my "The Russian Working Class and Labour Movement in Year Four of "Shock Therapy' ?, in D. Mandel, The Former "State Socialist" World, Black Rose Press, Montreal, pp. 46-68.) • Failure of Leadership
The leadership of the "traditional" trade unions (mostly affiliated to the Federation of Independent Trade Union of Russia, FNPR officially supported neither Zyuganov nor Yeltsin, even though Zyuganov's economic programme corresponds closely to the FNPR's "social reorientation of the market reforms." The official reason was that some of the KPRF's coalition allies were calling for revenge and even dictatorship. On the other hand, Yeltsin's sudden conversion to a "social market economy" could not be taken seriously. And, finally, to support one of the two candidates would only deepen the
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Logically, this analysis should have lead to an appeal to vote "against all", a real option on the second-round ballot, which many democratic socialists were advocating. Instead, the FNPR appealed to its members to exercise their right to vote, an appeal that, as everyone knew, favoured Yeltsin. Nor was the FNPR leadership ever able to explain how Yeltsin ended up speaking at its May Day rally, which the federation organized separately from the (much larger) Com-
Apart from the inconsistency of the FNPR's position and its de facto leaning toward Yeltsin, it never questioned its own role in creating a situation where all the alternatives were bad. In fact, the FNPR bureaucrats, after toying with the idea, long ago rejected the idea of working toward an independent political expression for labour. Instead, they repeatedly entered coalitions with "centrists" from the so-called "directors corps", all of which failed miserably.
The FNPR position vis-a-vis the government is one of "social partnership", although the "partner" is conducting a vicious offensive against the workers' living standards and rights. M. Shmakov, president of the FNPR, has admitted that in these conditions "social partnership" can achieve little for workers, but he justifies the the threat of repression that hangs over the unions. (Solidarnost', no. 12, 1995, p. 8.) In other words, the organization and its (considerable) financial and real-estate holdings are to be protected at any cost, even if that requires sacrificing the goals of the organization.
As for the "alternative" unions that arose after 1990 (and whose membership has stagnated in the past years at a small percentage of the total unionized workforce), their leaders obligingly accepted Yeltsin's invitation to a two-day all-expenses-paid gathering in Moscow, where, once again, they fell in behind the president. Some did so out of visceral anti-communism; others because they were bought off.
Today, there are no insurmountable political or organizational obstacles to a democratic change of union leadership. But the rank-and-file of the unions suffers from a deep sense of powerlessness, and, despite the formal 85+ per cent union membership rate, is quite atomized. The level of solidarity and identification with the unions is generally so weak that it is almost an exaggeration to speak of organized labour. Moreover, relatively few workers have any direct experience of independent collective struggle, and even fewer - of struggles that have ended in victory.
The profound economic crisis, the dramatic decline in real incomes, and the mass unemployment, both formal and de facto, have created a profound sense of insecurity and have weakened workers social and economic ties to the enterprises. In many plants work is episodic, and income has to be supplemented, where possible, by other jobs and/or by the garden plots. (Some speak of phenomenon of the Moreover, as de-industrialization proceeds apace (especially in the secondaryprocessing sector - machine-construction and consumer goods), the large enterprises are quickly losing their most active, independent workers. Those who remain are often older people who stay only because they look forward to some social benefit expectations that serve to increase their dependency on management, or else they stay simply because they fear that they lack the skills or initiative to improve their situation in the The decline in the industrial work force has predominantly taken the form of leaving own will", i.e. quitting "voluntarily" because one can no longer feed one's family. Yeltsin's policy has been so far not to force bankruptcies and closures, even though a very large number of enterprises are insolvent. Activists often say that mass layoffs would be better, since this would provoke a collective reaction. As it is, a significant part of the workers is becoming declasse, making them an easier prey for manipulation by the propaganda machine. This surely was a factor in the elections. How else can one explain why Yeltsin won 53% of the vote in the second round (with 39% to Zyuganov) in the Ivanovo region, a major textile manufacturing centre and one of the most depressed areas of Russia, with the highest unemployment rate and widespread child malnutrition? Immediate prospects
Yeltsin's re-election, regardless of how it was achieved, is a defeat for the working class. The labour movement at present plays no active role in shaping the social and political evolution of Russian society and there are no signs of a revival in the near future. In June, one activist at the Kirov Factory in St. Petersburg expressed a widespread view: "The situation puts constant psychological pressure on workers. People are so depressed that they let themselves be fired without complaint. Before, it seemed to me that some kind of protest was maturing. Now I fear people are totally crushed...
Of course, things could change quite suddenly through a combined crisis "at the top" and a major increase in popular hardship, especially on the background of
Yeltsin's electoral promises possible, even likely, in
Yeltsin's death, which seem is in office, will certainly touch off a p crisis within the elite, especially given
Lebed's ambitions and the insecure nature of the bourgeoisie, with its very personalized relations to the state administration.
On the other hand, a further deterioration of the economic situation is likely to occur in the fall and winter, bringing new hardships to the mass of the population. The GDP continued to decline in the first six months of 1996 (a trend that began in 1990), falling by 5% over the same period last year (and by a full 9% in June as compared to June 1995). (July 16, 1996, OMRI). Although Yeltsin in a recent speech promised to change economic policy to give priority to raising living standards, strengthening social protections, and to providing factories with orders, this is a familiar post-election refrain that has never been realized. Almost immediately after the elections, the IMF withheld its monthly pay ment of the $10 billion loan (after paying for months in a row) and is insisting that the government reduce its budget deficit (which stands at roughly twice the agreed-upon amount (July 8, 1996).
This will certainly means a return to "shock therapy" - strict monetarism, reduced state spending, continued economic decline. With privatization effectively achieved, Yeltsin will be under pressure finally to force the enterprises to "rationalize". This would mean bankruptcies and a sharp rise in open unemployment. That it will be "shock therapy as usual" is also indicated by the retention of Chernomyrdin as prime minister and the new appointment of Chubais as presidential chief-of-staff. (Yeltsin certainly lost little time in renewing the war against Chechnya.)
Many observers feel a looming banking crisis, and that had been artificially held back for electoral purposes. (The Economist, July secure and as the government makes good its intention of opening the treasury bill market to foreign capital, the predicted drop in the hitherto astronomic interest rates on these securities will wipe out the banks major source of profits.
It is possible, therefore, that the coming fall and winter will see a rise in social protest. However, given the labour movement's present weakness and the insecurity caused by the economic crisis, this protest will probably not be translated into effective action on the political level, the only level on which significant improvement can be won. If a real threat to Yeltsin's policies does emerge, he will not hesitate to use repression.
Yeltsin's death, on background of an economic crisis and a rise in labour protest, could lead to an open dictatorship. Lebed, an admirer of Pinochet, might then find an appropriate role for himself. Once hated and feared by liberals for his outspoken criticism of the Yeltsin regime, his recent appointment was hailed as yet another "brilliant move" on Yeltsin's part. Lebed describes himself as "half a democrat." But for Russian liberals, the main half was always the market. *