May 3 found Yeltsin in Yaroslavl, on the Volga north of Moscow. The next week he alighted in Volgograd and Astrakhan on the lower Volga, and the week after that in central Siberia. The northern reaches of European Russia and the Urals followed at the end of May, and then came Tver, Kazan, two jaunts into the North Caucasus, west Siberia, Nizhnii Novgorod and the middle Volga, St. Petersburg, and, for a curtain call, Yekaterinburg on June 14. On May 9, for Victory Day over Nazi Germany, Yeltsin addressed the parade in Moscow’s Red Square. He then jetted to Volgograd, the former Stalingrad, to speak a second time at Mamayev Kurgan, the tumulus looking out over the Volga that bears a towering statue of Mother Russia. It was dusk, and people lit candles and flashlights. Press secretary Sergei Medvedev stood next to him: “I could sense that he was stirred up, as if by the common breathing of thousands of people. He had with him some prepared materials but threw them away and spoke effusively. . . . The people accepted him and cried out. . . . It was as if the air was electric, and he could feel it.”94 The kinder, gentler Yeltsin jested with well-wishers and asked if they had questions for him, kissed ladies’ hands, and laid wreaths at statues and war memorials. Cordless microphone in hand, he forged through town squares, cathedrals, produce markets, army barracks, pig farms, fish hatcheries, foundries, and coal mines. During an interlude by musicians in Ufa on May 30, he did the twist: “Quite a plucky little twist it was, too, complete with swaying hips, flapping elbows, and upper teeth bared over lower lip. The 10,000 kids . . . went wild.” After Yeltsin waved and left the stage, Andrei Makarevich, lead singer of the rock group Time Machine, which had been kept off the radio under Brezhnev (and which performed before the Moscow White House in August 1991), urged them to vote for Yeltsin “so Time Machine can keep on playing.”95 On June 10 at a concert by the pop singer Yevgenii Osin in a stadium in Rostov, on the Don River, Yeltsin called on the standing-room-only audience to “vote as you should” so they could all “live in a free Russia,” and then doffed his suit jacket and boogie-woogied with Osin and two miniskirted female vocalists.
No campaign event was complete without gifts large and small. The aim was to give a foretaste of the eventual benefits of reform and to underline the candidate’s responsiveness. As each day on the hustings was planned out the evening before, staffers asked
President Boris N. Yeltsin was in a beneficent, spendthrift mood on the campaign trail today. He promised a Tatar leader he met on the street $50,000 to open a new Muslim cultural center here. He visited a convent of the Russian Orthodox Church and gave $10,000 from the treasury to help cover the nuns’ housekeeping costs. . . . He even vowed to have a telephone installed for a woman who complained that she had been waiting for telephone service for eight years. . . .
But it was at an afternoon encounter with more than thirty local officials, factory directors, and local newspaper editors that Mr. Yeltsin disclosed the risks he is prepared to take in his effort to remain in the Kremlin. . . . Several local officials stood up to complain that taxes were strangling their companies and factories. They begged Mr. Yeltsin to restore a tax break that was introduced in 1994 to help ailing industries burdened by tax debts. . . . Under pressure from the IMF, the Russian government phased out the loophole last year. . . .
[Vladimir] Panskov, the finance minister [of Russia] argued against the loophole] in the middle of the meeting. . . .
Mr. Yeltsin turned to his audience. “The government is definitely against this,” he said. “Can any of you, specialists, economists, think of another way out?”
When they cried “No!” Mr. Yeltsin turned back to his finance minister, who stood waiting, wearing a pained expression. “Before the election,” the president instructed him with a smile, “let’s submit a decree.”
Everyone in the room applauded except Mr. Panskov.97
