Bare-knuckle tactics were deployed in other areas, too. Chernomyrdin assigned a deputy premier, Yurii Yarov, to work daily with the campaign staff and see to it that the federal bureaucracy used “administrative levers” as best it could to the president’s gain. Sergei Shakhrai handled relations with the governors and republic presidents, most of whom swung into line.65 The Kremlin collected explicit endorsements, among them from dignitaries (such as Yegor Gaidar) who had split with Yeltsin, and unformalized support from the Russian Orthodox Church and the military hierarchy. The mass media, and especially the three national television channels, on which paid advertising for the candidates opened on May 14, were of special concern. The ORT and RTR networks were owned by the state; NTV was privately owned and had been very critical of the war in Chechnya, but it broadcast on sufferance of Yeltsin’s government. And yet, coercion was not the primary reason the media sided with Yeltsin in 1996. Since the alternatives appeared to boil down to him or a return of the communists who had censored the press for seventy years, it seemed to most journalists and media managers, as Igor Malashenko put it, that “damaging” as it might have been for the press to take sides in a political conflict, its corporate self-interest meant it “did not have any choice” in the matter. Malashenko remained as president of NTV while moonlighting as Yeltsin’s chief media adviser. Although he considered resigning or going on leave from the network, “I believed this would have been just cant, because everybody in Russia would know that this is not the United States, that my position in the [NTV] group would be the same.”66 Between mid-May and mid-June, 55 percent of all campaign stories on ORT’s nightly prime-time news mentioned Yeltsin, compared to 35 percent mentions for Zyuganov; on NTV’s program, it was 59 percent and 34 percent.67
None of these methods, however, was enough to dictate victory. Yeltsin was not able to oust Yavlinskii, and the backing from Lebed would take effect only in a runoff round. The electronic and print media had been skewed toward Our Home Is Russia in 1995, and that had not done the party or Chernomyrdin much good.68 A great many citizens distrusted the news media and did not believe them to be even-handed; almost 40 percent of Russians had questions about coverage of the 1995 Duma campaign and more than 50 percent about the 1996 presidential campaign.69 Even with the media elite’s bias toward Yeltsin, the flow of information and advocacy that got through to individual voters was quite large and diverse. Paid ads aside, a lottery gave all candidates eight free ten-minute slots on national television. As of the beginning of June, a non-trivial 45 percent of the population had been exposed to Zyuganov campaign materials on television, on the radio, or in print in the preceding week; for Yeltsin, it was 58 percent.70 And news bulletins, particularly on NTV, offered substantial reportage on opposition candidates (mostly by replaying their words) and on issues, such as economic difficulties and Yeltsin’s health, that were inconvenient for the president.71
From his single-digit popularity in January, Yeltsin rebounded to a plurality of the votes in June and a second-round majority in July. In Aleksandr Oslon’s first systematic poll of the electorate on March 1, 13 percent of Russians intending to vote in the first round preferred Yeltsin and 19 percent Zyuganov. Over the course of March and April, Yeltsin’s anticipated vote share doubled while Zyuganov’s only edged up. The first Oslon poll to show Yeltsin ahead of Zyuganov, by 23 percent to 22 percent, was on April 13, but they were tied on April 20 and again on May 4. On May 11 Yeltsin nosed ahead by 4 points, by 28 percent to 24 percent, and he never looked back after that. By June 11, 36 percent of citizens intended to vote for him and Zyuganov’s expected share had dipped to 18 percent.72 The spread narrowed some by election day, but any way you look at it was a blockbuster recovery. And it was achieved in all demographic subgroups, be they by age, community size and location, gender, or social class.73
