Star Tribune News with a View -

Star Tribune
News with a View - Perspectives and personal views on current and cultural affairs, appearing every Monday and Thursday - By Nick Hayes
Thursday, June 20, 1996

Moscow- Five years ago, in the summer of 1991, Boris Yeltsin could not be stopped in any fair election, but now, in his second electoral campaign, he had to be sold to a disillusioned Russian voting public.

Yeltsin deserves some praise. This has been one phenomenal comeback. Since January, when his approval rating reached its all-time low at 8 percent, he has more then quadrupled his support. The Communist Party leader, Gennady Zyuganov, may have been just the political challenge Yeltsin needed. The old Russian warrior appeared to regain his stride as he rose to meet the challenge once again of fighting the bureaucratic Zyuganov campaign.

In June 1991, Boris Yeltsin won the Russian presidential election with
about 60 percent of the vote. Two months later, he dramatically rallied opposition to the coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Above, Yeltsin stood atop an armored personnel carrier as he called for resistance. At right, he acknowledged thousands of supporters. When the coup failed, he was widely regarded as a hero.

Yeltsin’s reelection campaign, assisted by a Moscow ad agency, picked up momentum after a gloomy starting point.

On June 12, several days before the first round of voting, a large, enthusiastic crowd turned out to back Yeltsin at a Russian Independence Day rally in Moscow. Above, security people pulled aside a curtain as the president came to the stage. At left, the crowd filled Red Square.

Thus, as the campaign came to a close, there was a hint of the days of 1991. Take, for instance, Yeltsin’s appearance at a rally just outside the Kremlin, where he addressed a mostly young crowd of more than 200,000. For the first time in five years, the chant of his glory days- “Yeltsin! Yeltsin! Yeltsin!” – reverberated around the Kremlin walls.

Watching Yeltsin address the crowd, I sensed that this was the man I remembered from the late 1980s and especially the summer of 1991, when, in his first campaign, a brave Boris defied a reactionary state to the cheers of everyday Russians.

Well, not quite. The old Boris spoke off the cuff and relied upon instinct and spontaneity when dealing with the press. This Boris delivered well-polished sound bites on a stage set up for the television cameras of the Russian evening news. The old Yeltsin was consistently late, but this Yeltsin appeared promptly at 7 p.m., just as his public relations staff had promised the press, and kept his speech simple and short enough for every reporter to meet a filing deadline.

The event itself- June 12, Russian Independence Day- was a new and hastily conceived holiday that had more to do with Yeltsin’s campaign strategy than with a commemoration of Russian history. Most commentators viewed the Independence Day as an effort by the campaign to take credit for at least one paid holiday conveniently scheduled on the eve of the elections.

The event gave Yeltsin the kind of photo op that the numerous flag factories had given George Bush in the United States in 1988. The Russian tricolor flag decked out the stage as the perfect evening light of the summer sun cast Yeltsin before the TV cameras with his back to the Kremlin walls.

All of this should sound familiar. A slick media campaign more than any other factor brought Yeltsin back from the politically dead six months ago. The Yeltsin campaign took on the services of a savvy Moscow-based advertising agency, Video International, which apparently did for Yeltsin what Roger Ailes did for Bush. The agency packaged and sold the Russians a “new” Yeltsin.

Unfortunately, the memories of the past five years had largely eroded the image of the heroic Yeltsin struggling against communism. Russians had become accustomed to seeing their president on TV as a sort of puffy Al Bundy who all too frequently slurred his speech, mouthed off expletives and occasionally groped after women.

Video International packaged a new image that, in the words of its research and marketing director, Vladimir Semyonov, was not so much about Yeltsin as it was an attempt at mood alteration. “Our task was to show feelings,” he told me. We wanted to show not so much Yeltsin, but ordinary Russian people.”

What images did the agency choose? The TV ads and billboards showed ordinary Russians from the past and mixed the images with still shots of Yeltsin in his younger days, with his mother, wife, children, grandchildren. One ad ends with Yeltsin seated in a conventional Russian armchair, without a tie and delivering his campaign theme: “We believe, we love, we hope.”

“I like to call it the Chekhov style,” Semyonov said in describing these ads that surrounded Yeltsin with images of everything from the past that Russians hold dear. The play on nostalgia blended with anxieties about the future. “We wanted to frame the question not on whether Yeltsin was good or bad, but whether Russia was going forward of backward so that Russians would say, all right, everything is bad now but I’ll vote for Yeltsin because of my children.”

Take, for example, the message behind one of Yeltsin’s most popular commercials. We see the smiling face of a baby boy superimposed on a background of angry political slogans and soundtrack of belligerent political rhetoric as a caring voice says, “If you don’t go to vote, someone else will decide the fate of your child.”

Yeltsin spent about $3 million, or 15 times as much as any other candidate spent, to sell this image.

What is more, he had another weapon in his media arsenal: the generous coverage that he received from the TV networks that led every daytime and nightly news program with flattering portraits of him; meanwhile, his rivals received scant and usually negative coverage tossed here and there in the latter parts of the program.

A few days before the campaign ended, the extreme nationalist candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky claimed that state TV went so far on behalf of Yeltsin that it used computer imaging to distort Zhirinovsky’s face and make him look ugly.

The media made no apology for their support of Yeltsin. The president of Russia’s Independent Television Network (NTV), Igor Malashenko, served as public relations director for the Yeltsin campaign and never considered it appropriate for him to resign from his powerful position in television.

At the state television network, Konstantin Tolchilin was in charge of campaign coverage. “Look,” he argued, “we don’t have the luxury of neutrality; to criticize Yeltsin would be to put the cart before the horse, and Yeltsin is the horse that is leading us toward democracy and a free press.”

The dilemma is clear, but what is not clear is whether this horse is pulling along a democratic society. Two days after Yeltsin edged out Zyuganov in the first round, he moved to bolster his position for the second round of the election in July; but he did so not by joining sides with the liberal reform opposition represented by Grigory Yavlinsky, but by bringing retired Gen Alexander Lebed into the Yeltsin government and campaign.

With Yavlinsky having received only 8 percent of the vote in the first round, the combination of 32 percent for an old Communist hack (Zyuganov), 15 for a disgruntled, retired general (Lebed) and 7 for a clown fascist (Zhirinovsky)

As a longtime Russian friend who admits to cynicism over the fate of Russian politics said, “I don’t know why the Communists are so opposed to Yeltsin; he’s given them everything they could possibly want.”

-Nick Hayes teaches Russian history and international studies at Hamline University and comments on Russian and European affairs for KTCA-TV’s “Almanac.”