Responding to Yeltsin’s January and February directives and to dogged pressure from the government and the presidential executive office, back wages in the nonstate sector were paid up by early April; in the state sector, a large improvement was made by early May. National-level initiatives in social spending raised pensions for war veterans and other elders, allowances for single mothers and diabetics, and salaries and summer pay for teachers and scientists; ordered restitution for bank depositors whose savings were made worthless by hyperinflation in 1992; and instituted a loan program for house builders. Other decrees singled out aerospace contractors, the agrarian complex, and small businesses. In the symbolic domain, there was something for almost everybody. Several decrees recognized the rights of Cossack communities shattered by the communists. In April Yeltsin ruled that a Soviet-style red banner (adorned with a gold star in place of the communist hammer-and-sickle) would fly alongside the Russian tricolor at patriotic observances, while having the Presidential Regiment fitted out in splendid new dress uniforms recalling the tsar’s guard force before 1917.91 In a sop to youth, he decreed on May 16 that Russia would have an all-volunteer army and conscription would be ended by 2000.
The biggest contribution of Igor Malashenko was to convince Yeltsin of the need for direct communication with the public. This was a way to both go beyond mediated contact and supply raw material for circulation in the mass media. In one of their first meetings, Malashenko told Yeltsin the story of how George H. W. Bush had profited politically from his dropping in at a New Jersey flag factory during the 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis. Yeltsin needed scenes like that, Malashenko said, and would have to generate one headline per day that could be associated with him personally. “He grasped it at once,” Malashenko recalled. “I never had a reason to complain because, although his health was waning, he did incredible things. He made news every day.”92 It took several weeks for Yeltsin to grasp that he had to make contact locally and in the flesh. He wended his way through the Belgorod area south of Moscow in the first week of April and then through Krasnodar and Budënnovsk, the site of the 1995 terror incident, in mid-April. In Krasnodar Yeltsin stood behind a line of guards, with silent people kept at a distance. Malashenko and Chubais showed him photographs of the scene and contrasted it to his barnstorming in 1989–91. On his next field trip, to Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East (where he dropped in on his way to Beijing), Yeltsin hoofed it into the crowd and “it produced a whole different image.”93
