Television ads to expand on Yeltsin’s speeches were prepared by Video International, Russia’s largest TV advertising agency, with advice from the U.S. public-relations firm Ogilvy and Mather—whose 1996 clients included Dresdner Bank, American Express, Unilever, and Telefonica—and from other American and British consultants. Forty-five short ads on the theme “I Believe, I Love, I Hope” ran two or three per evening. Laymen selected to represent a type (farmer, doctor, housewife, athlete, student, and so forth) spoke soothingly about the future in store if Yeltsin got his second mandate. In one of the first to air, a World War II veteran “looks straight into the camera and says wistfully, ‘I just want my children and grandchildren to finally savor the fruits of the victory we fought for and that they didn’t let us enjoy.’ ‘They’ is a not-so-subliminal reference to communists.” 85 A related series of “Choose or Lose” clips and rock concerts were aimed at getting younger citizens to turn out to vote. At the same time, anti-communist videos, posters, and billboards represented the Soviet regime in a harsh light, through representations of labor camps, bare store shelves, and overage Politburo members reviewing parades on Lenin’s tomb. Borderline demagogic as the line was, it served Yeltsin’s electoral purpose admirably. Of men and women who preferred the post-Soviet political system, almost 70 percent backed Yeltsin on June 16 and fewer than 10 percent voted for Zyuganov; among backers of the Soviet polity, the proportions were reversed.86
A third vote-getting technique was hinged on Boris Yeltsin’s persona. The candidate in this mode would be presented as a father figure, rugged and knowing but also suffering and recovering with his people. A gauzy “Vote with Your Heart” ad series was unrolled in May, after extensive survey and focus-group research. As Yeltsin noted in a memoir, “Humble people were shown speaking on the television screen what they thought of me. . . . Interest in the president’s personality rose. The people were surprised and started thinking . . . [and] woke up. . . . ‘Look at the new Yeltsin [they said], he has come alive, he is up to something, so maybe we should bet on him again!’”87 In the closing days of the campaign, an ad was aired showing Yeltsin musing about his youth and his courtship of Naina Yeltsina, to the accompaniment of schmaltzy music. To improve her husband’s image, Naina gave press interviews about their children, grandchildren, and family life. A mass-distributed photo album and documentary film shots showed the president bone tired, elated, and frustrated and pictured his thumbless left hand, which he normally did his best to conceal.
This strand of the re-election campaign must be judged a qualified success. In-depth survey data from the summer of 1996 show majorities reckoning Yeltsin to be intelligent and possessed of a vision of Russia’s future, while opinion on his strength and trustworthiness split evenly. On one character trait, though, Yeltsin continued to get consistently critical assessments. That trait was empathy, where respondents were asked if Yeltsin “really cares about people like you.” Only one person in four agreed with that statement, and responses were closely correlated with economic assessments.88 That explains the seriousness with which the Yeltsin campaign took its fourth objective—to find ways to bring him down from his lordly perch to relate to Russia’s transitional citizens as human beings.
The greening of Yeltsin could be attempted through the electronic advertising blitz and through creative use of incumbency. In the latter capacity, Yeltsin played Santa Claus for a solid half-year, ladling out material and symbolic largesse to well-selected segments of the populace. The economic payout was brought about by administrative discipline and legerdemain, use of foreign credits, and borrowing against future revenues. In January, February, and March, Yeltsin signed seven or eight decrees per month allocating concrete benefits to particular constituencies; the number hit twenty-two in April and thirty-four in May and the first two weeks of June.89 Although many of his acts of generosity were in response to requests, “Often Yeltsin was the inspirer of the decrees, which . . . grew copiously in the election season. He felt an especially sharp need for them in May. Getting his assistants together, he would demand from them ‘fresh ideas for decrees.’”90
