70 FOM (Fond “Obshchestvennoye mneniye”), Rezul’taty sotsiologicheskikh issledovanii (Results of sociological research), June 13, 1996, 1. The complete run of this in-house bulletin of Aleksandr Oslon’s Public Opinion Foundation was supplied to the author by Oslon.
71 See Ellen Mickiewiecz, Changing Channels: Television and the Struggle for Power in Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 178–84. Even on NTV, though, news anchors opined in the final weeks of the first-round campaign, and reporters subjected Zyuganov’s promises and claims to searching questioning while largely sparing Yeltsin.
72 FOM, Rezul’taty, June 19, 1996, 1. Surveys by the VTsIOM group show a similar trend. See Stephen White, Richard Rose, and Ian McAllister, How Russia Votes (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1997), 258. VTsIOM data show Yeltsin fifth among intended voters in the second half of January, behind Zyuganov, Lebed, Yavlinskii, and Zhirinovskii.
73 Yeltsin led Zyuganov among individuals thirty-five and younger from the beginning; he overtook Zyuganov among persons aged thirty-six to forty-five on April 21, among those forty-six to fifty-five on May 18, and among those older than fifty-five on June 1. He surpassed Zyuganov in March in Moscow and St. Petersburg, in early April in cities of over 1 million in population, in mid-May in other cities and towns, and in the villages of Russia in the first half of June. He won majority support among men and women at about the same time. Poorly educated and low-paid Russians rallied to Yeltsin, and by a narrow margin, only in June; those with a college-level diploma and higher incomes were on his side from the start. FOM, Rezul’taty, June 19, 1996, 1–3.
74 Talbott, Russia Hand, 161–62; Goldgeier and McFaul, Power and Purpose, 196–97. The request had been made by Russian diplomats before Yeltsin discussed it with Clinton in May 1995. Yeltsin first tried to sell Clinton on a delay until after the two of them left office at the end of the decade.
75 Mikhail Rostovskii, “Mutatsiya klana” (Mutation of the clan), Moskovskii komsomolets, December 3, 2002 (citing a conversation with Korzhakov).
76 Talbott, Russia Hand, 202, 204. Clinton was furious when Yeltsin lectured him in front of the press for the excesses of American foreign policy and Yeltsin left the room before Clinton could reply.
77 Alan Friedman, “James D. Wolfensohn: World Bank and Russian Reform,” International Herald Tribune, May 27, 1996.
78 Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy, 407.
79 Baturin et al., Epokha, 658.
80 The revelations about the assassination threat and the white lie to his wife are in “Boris Nemtsov—Yevgenii Al’bats o Yel’tsine” (Boris Nemtsov to Yevgeniya Al’bats about Yeltsin), Novoye vremya/New Times, April 30, 2007.
81 FOM, Rezul’taty, June 5, 1996, 3. Earlier polls had shown that Chechnya was the single biggest strike against Yeltsin in public opinion and that 70 percent of citizens favored either a pullout or a cessation of hostilities without a pullout.
82 Ibid., April 22, 1996, 2.
83 Ibid., May 10, 1996, 2 (italics added). The bifurcation or polarization gambit is well drawn in McFaul, Russia’s 1996 Presidential Election; and Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), chap. 13.
84 Dobrokhotov, Ot Yel’tsina, 234–38.
85 Alessandra Stanley, “With Campaign Staff in Disarray, Yeltsin Depends on Perks of Office,” New York Times, May 13, 1996. Stanley wrote in another story (“A Media Campaign Most Russian and Most Unreal,” ibid., June 2, 1996) that the “indirection and goosebumpy emotional tug” of the ads recall General Electric advertising in the United States (“We bring good things to life”). Among the foreign consultants were Sir Tim Bell of the British firm Bell Pottinger (once a counselor to Margaret Thatcher), several media advisers to California governor Pete Wilson, and Richard Dresner, a former business partner of Dick Morris. See Kramer, “Rescuing Boris”; Sarah E. Mendelson, “Democracy Assistance and Political Transition in Russia,” International Security 25 (Spring 2001), 93–94; and Gerry Sussman, Global Electioneering: Campaign Consulting, Communications, and Corporate Financing (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 139–40.
86 Source: the survey data used in the writing of Colton, Transitional Citizens.
