Yeltsin полностью

In the Siberian center of Krasnoyarsk on May 17, Yeltsin jibed to residents that he had thrown a coin into the Yenisei River for luck, “but you should not think that this will be the end of my financial help to the Krasnoyarsk region.”⁹⁸ On a stopover at the White Sea port of Arkhangelsk on May 24, he proclaimed that he had arrived “with full pockets.” “Today a little money will be coming into Arkhangelsk oblast.”⁹⁹ Having announced grants to local building projects there, he belted along to a meet-and-run in Vorkuta, a coal-mining center near the mouth of the Ob, where he committed to assistance for the construction of retirement homes in the south, a 50 percent reduction in rail tariffs on coal from the area—and, to miner Lidiya Denisyuk, whom he encountered underground, a Zhiguli car for her disadvantaged family.¹⁰⁰ In Chechnya on May 28 with Boris Nemtsov, he asked the governor to deliver Gazelle trucks and Volga cars to Chechen farmers from the GAZ plant in Nizhnii Novgorod. In Ufa on May 30, Yeltsin marked the beginning of preparatory construction work for its new subway. In Kazan on June 9, wearing a tyuboteika, a needlepointed Tatar skullcap, he promised to finance a subway; city and republic had been pushing for one since 1983. Elsewhere, the handouts included tractors and combines for kolkhozes, discounts on electricity costs, forgiveness of municipal debts, funds for reconstructing and enlarging libraries and clinics, and power-sharing pacts with governors and republic presidents (twelve of these were finalized during the campaign).

Promises made on the stump would be promises to keep afterward. The unrealism of some of those offered in 1996 was not lost on the craftsmen. They chose to subordinate this point to the realpolitik of winning in the here and now. The populist decree on ending the military draft by 2000 was a case in point. To write it, Yeltsin had to overrule the generals and his national security adviser, Yurii Baturin, who counseled that out of practical considerations the draft could not be dispensed with before 2005. Baturin refused to sign off on the draft edict, whereupon Nikolai Yegorov, the president’s new chief of staff—a conservative with good ties to the army—telephoned to say it would go ahead without him. “Now it is necessary to win the election, and after that we will look into it.”¹⁰¹ Russia today still has conscription.

Yeltsin’s last election campaign was a catch-all campaign. Vitalii Tret’yakov, the editor-in-chief of Nezavisimaya gazeta, saw in his plan of attack the philosophy of Luka, the picaresque codger in the play The Lower Depths, by Maxim Gorky. “Ni odna blokha ne plokha,” Luka quipped to his fellow boarding-house residents—“Every flea is a good flea,” as they are all dark in color and they all know how to jump. “Yeltsin-Luka lets everyone gallop away” to their heart’s content, editorialized Tret’yakov; mixing metaphors, he added that the Yeltsin team had vacuumed up everyone else’s ideas and taken “one million positions on one hundred questions.” He was being somewhat unkind, for Yeltsin was consistent on some higher-order political questions, such as whether or not to let the communists return, while picking his openings on many lower-order questions. But Tret’yakov also noted that to Yeltsin’s million positions his opponents had been “unable to counterpoise clear and legible positions on even ten key problems.”¹⁰²

Tret’yakov’s editorial came out on May 7. Seventy-five million participating voters had their say on Sunday, June 16. Yeltsin took 26,665,495 votes. It was some 19 million fewer than he had received in 1991 but still put him in first place, with 36 percent of the ballots. Zyuganov had 32 percent, Lebed 15 percent, Yavlinskii 7 percent, and Zhirinovskii 6 percent. Everyone else trailed with less than 1 percent. In his final indignity at Yeltsin’s hands, Mikhail Gorbachev took one-half of 1 percent—386,069 votes. While bleeding strength compared to 1991 in every macroregion of Russia, Yeltsin carried forty-six of the provinces and Zyuganov forty-three. Yeltsin did better than average in the northern and northwestern sections of European Russia, Moscow, the Urals, and Siberia; he was weakest in the red belt south of Moscow and in the North Caucasus.