By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — In Russian warships based in the port of Kaliningrad, the English-language Moscow Tribune reported on April 26, the vote in the April 25 referendum went heavily against President Boris Yeltsin. This was not just a reflection of hostility to Yeltsin in the armed forces — though the president ought to be gravely concerned on that score.
Probably to an even greater extent, the sailors' failure to endorse Yeltsin reflected the fact that while out at sea, they were among the few Russian citizens not exposed to a television and radio assault of staggering one-sidedness.
Yeltsin's "triumph" in the poll was not in fact particularly impressive — only 34% of eligible voters turned out to endorse his economic policies. Still, it is astonishing by how much the vote for Yeltsin exceeded the predictions of opinion surveys taken before the campaign began in earnest some two weeks earlier. Meanwhile, some of the most pro-Yeltsin Western journalists in Moscow have had to concede that the conduct of the electronic media during the campaign was — well, not up to the elevated standards of the West.
On St Petersburg television, which is relayed throughout much of Russia, election eve viewing consisted of a five-hour spectacular in favour of the president. The staunchly pro-Yeltsin Moscow Tribune was moved to observe: "The sight of the country's leading artists, actors and musicians professing loyalty to President Yeltsin in one of the Kremlin's gilded halls reminded many visitors of the ceremonies of Andrei Zhdanov, late and unlamented cultural commissar of Stalin".
A few days before viewers were to decide whether they had "confidence" in the president, they were also treated to an hour-long program depicting Yeltsin "at home" in a typical three-room flat with his family. The scene was not even authentic: the flat was that of the president's daughter. Yeltsin and his wife currently live in a well-appointed villa on the outskirts of Moscow, and are soon to move into a palatial 400-square-metre apartment in a building being constructed especially for senior state officials.
Among other slabs of free prime-time advertising enjoyed by the president, the most outrageous was perhaps the one screened during the interval of the Spartak Moscow versus Antwerp European Football Cup match. The manager of Spartak was shown in an interview urging people to vote for Yeltsin. The match attracted enormous interest in Russia, since it was the farthest any national team had advanced in the cup competition.
Meanwhile, some of Yeltsin's best-known opponents were having a hard time making it onto television at all. Alexander Rutskoi, who despite esident has emerged as a leader of the opposition Civic Union bloc, was denied air time on April 23 when he sought to make a speech exposing government corruption. On occasions when speeches by Rutskoi or Congress chairperson Ruslan Khasbulatov were screened, they were followed by withering pro-Yeltsin commentaries.
The one-sidedness of the television coverage of the campaign shows up in figures compiled by the parliamentary press office, and which the president's staff have not challenged. Of television programs which mentioned the referendum, the proportion of time taken up by programs supporting the president and programs supporting the parliament was as follows (programs in which both positions were featured were scored, perhaps unrealistically, on the basis that half the time went to each side):
Supporting:
Parliament
President
CIS TV
23%
77%
Russian TV
24
76
Moscow TV
17
83
Channel Four
15
85
St Petersburg TV
4
96
The bias in the coverage of political events is not denied by Russian TV producers and controllers. Under the title "Who Rules the Media?", Time magazine reported in its April 12 edition:
"Some journalists complain that broadcasts about anti-Yeltsin leaders get held up under the pretext that they might 'strike a blow against democracy' ... Yeltsin supporters respond that they must push hard for his embattled reforms. 'We are not so well advanced with our democracy as not to take sides,' said Yuri Reshetnikov, deputy director of Vesti [a Russian evening news program]. 'If we want the Yeltsin reforms to succeed, we must back them to the hilt.'"
Russian citizens who tire of televised plaudits to Yeltsin do, of course, have the option of buying newspapers instead. But they need to choose carefully, since the ratio on their television screens of about he president is roughly the same in the print media. Newspapers like Pravda that are critical of government policies attract little advertising, and are much more expensive than pro-Yeltsin papers.
Newspaper subscriptions in general have fallen sharply since Yeltsin's "reforms" began cutting deeply into people's real incomes. The situation described by a correspondent for the paper Rabochaya Tribuna is now commonplace:
"In my apartment building (as I ascertained from the post office), only a few people now receive newspapers. They're expensive, the neighbours consider, and what's the point if there's radio and television?"
With the electronic media exercising a heavy dominance over the information field, and Yeltsin and his supporters ruthlessly exploiting a near-monopoly of the electronic media, the reasons why unexpectedly large numbers of Russians turned out on April 25 to express "confidence" in the president seem less mysterious.