Russian elections: Yeltsin running scared
By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Is President Boris Yeltsin about to romp home an easy winner in the Russian presidential elections, pulling in the support of previously uncommitted voters and overwhelming his main opponent, Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) leader Gennady Zyuganov?
A dramatic boom on the Moscow stock market during the second half of May was fuelled by voter surveys indicating a sudden leap in Yeltsin's popularity. Previously the underdog, the incumbent president is now seen as likely to come in slightly ahead of Zyuganov in the first-round voting on June 16. In the July 7 run-off between the top two vote-getters, most surveys predict, Yeltsin will open up a substantial lead.
But Yeltsin and his campaign strategists show few signs of believing the pollsters' predictions.
The survey results must be treated with scepticism. Opinion surveys in Russia are normally based on telephone polling. But many Russians have understandable misgivings about telling an unfamiliar caller that they oppose the government and plan to vote for the opposition.
Moreover, telephones in Russia are not the several-per-household fixtures they are in the West. In the small towns and villages where tens of millions of Russians still live, few people enjoy such amenities. Even in urban areas, large numbers of households lack telephones. The people most likely to be without them are people on low incomes, including workers who have not received their wages.
Country people and the urban poor, meanwhile, are among the citizens most likely to vote for the KPRF. Telephone polling in Russia therefore tends to create a quite inaccurate picture of voter intentions, tilting the results strongly to the right.
Unimpressed by either Yeltsin or Zyuganov, more than a third of voters are expected to choose other candidates on June 16. Pro-Yeltsin commentators argue that in the second round on July 7, these voters will switch heavily to supporting Yeltsin in order to keep the Communist candidate out of office.
However, electors who support Yeltsin only with reluctance will have another option on July 7 — going off to water the potatoes on their dacha plots, and staying away from the polling stations.
The readiness even of anticommunist Russians to cast ballots for Yeltsin is less than it might seem. A recent report by the Expert Institute of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs made the important point that Yeltsin's negative rating — reflecting the proportion of electors who would refuse to vote for him in almost any circumstances — was exceptionally high at some 50%. The corresponding figure for Zyuganov was only about 25%.
The same study described Yeltsin's core of committed supporters as only some 10 to 12 million voters, out of a likely total of 70 million. Zyuganov's base of "left traditionalists" was much larger at 22 to 24 million voters.
In late April, this situation made leaders of Russia's nomenklatura-capitalist elite wonder whether the elections should be allowed to take place at all. On April 27, 13 prominent bankers and industrialists issued a public appeal in which they called for a compromise between competing political forces, noting the possibility of violence and warning pointedly that elections would not solve Russia's problems.
The hint was soon taken up by the Yeltsin camp. Speaking to the London Observer on May 1, Yeltsin's security chief and close confidant, General Alexander Korzhakov, stated: "A lot of influential people are in favour of postponing the elections and I'm in favour of it too, because we need stability". On May 5 Korzhakov repeated these sentiments to the news agency Interfax.
Public reaction was hostile, and the president moved quickly to shoot down the trial balloon. The president and his backers then moved into a phase of intensive, no-holds-barred campaigning.
In its minor symbolic aspects, Yeltsin's scrabble for public favour has been more comic than sinister. In his May 9 Victory Day speech in Moscow, the president addressed his listeners using the Soviet-era form of address tovarishch — "comrade" — more than 20 times. On May 16 Yeltsin announced partial compensation for savings bank deposits wiped out by hyperinflation — but he limited this to citizens over the age of 80 years.
There is nothing amusing, however, in the juggernaut of demagogy and disinformation now rolling over the Russian airwaves. The English-language Moscow Times, which reflects opinion in expatriate business circles, editorialised on May 14:
"Over the past several weeks news broadcasts on the three major television stations ... have come more to resemble paid political advertising for the incumbent president than any attempt at impartial news coverage."
A sign of things to come was the coverage by Russian television stations of Yeltsin's visit early in May to the city of Yaroslavl, north-east of Moscow. While foreign news sources described how the president was booed and hissed by pensioners and unpaid workers, the Russian networks showed only adoring crowds.
Major events in Zyuganov's election campaign have been covered by the television networks, but often in derisive or alarmist fashion. When interviewing the Communist candidate, television journalists who are almost bashful with government leaders have turned abusive and bullying.
The general bias of the press and television has raised less anger on the left than a series of "dirty tricks". On May 16 the liberal Moscow daily Komsomolskaya Pravda headed its front page with extracts from a supposed Communist "program of emergency measures". Swiftly denounced by KPRF officials as "a fake from beginning to end", this called for "creating full state controls over the financial and banking system and over incomes and the circulation of goods and money". Dollars held by individuals were to be exchanged for roubles at a tenth of current rates, and clamps were to be reimposed on foreign travel.
Also in mid-May, the provincial Amurskaya Pravda ran a faked "interview" with Zyuganov, apparently aimed at fomenting splits within the KPRF. Zyuganov was quoted as saying he would not feel obligated as president to carry out ideas suggested by "odious" colleagues within the Communist leadership. The text was quoted widely by media outlets elsewhere in Russia.
Zyuganov and his colleagues have tried to match this offensive with scandalous revelations of their own. On May 12 the Communist candidate charged that Yeltsin during March had tried to win the support of the government for measures that included dissolving the lower house of parliament, declaring a state of emergency and cancelling the elections.
A far more dire threat than media slanders is the prospect of dirty tricks in the tally rooms. Large-scale electoral falsification is nothing new in post-Soviet Russia. Analysing the figures from the December 1993 referendum on Yeltsin's draft constitution, political scientists from Yeltsin's own apparatus concluded that massive irregularities had occurred, and that contrary to official claims, the constitution could not have been legitimately adopted.
The Zyuganov camp plans to mobilise 200,000 poll-watchers to observe all 97,000 polling places. However, there is little the KPRF can do to check on how the local voting tallies are added together to produce the final result.
"I think the result of the election will in simple terms be falsified", the head of the parliament's security commission, Viktor Ilyukhin, was quoted as saying on May 23. "I think the president will not be elected, he will be appointed. He will be appointed by the Central Election Commission."
Yeltsin should be taken quite literally when he insists, as he has done repeatedly, that Zyuganov "will not be allowed to win" the presidential elections. The incidence of fraud will probably not be massive — if this had seemed necessary, the elections would have been cancelled. But preparations will certainly be made for whatever degree of falsification is required.
At stake for the members of Russia's new elite is their sometimes enormous personal wealth, cornered in the first years of "reform" through favouritism, bribery, abuse of office and theft. Zyuganov has made clear his reluctance to challenge the results of privatisation. Nevertheless, popular expectations would put enormous pressure on him to launch investigations into the more flagrant cases of illegal enrichment. Russia's new rulers need to stop such inquiries at all costs.