20.06.1996
Yeltsin squeaks ahead
The first round of the Russian presidential election took place on June 16. The result contained some surprises, though most things have happened very much according to prediction.
The incumbent president, Boris Yeltsin (he of the White House siege and the empty vodka bottle) came out just in front, with about 35% of the vote. The opinion polls, which are almost worthless in Russia, had at first put Yeltsin well behind his main challenger, Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation leader. Then they started putting Yeltsin well ahead of Zyuganov. The actual result split the difference between these two sets of polls, with Yeltsin and Zyuganov winning more or less the same number of votes, leaving the other eight candidates well back in the clouds of dust.
A feature of the election campaign was the strong media bias in Yeltsin’s favour, especially on the television and radio. Night after night Yeltsin was shown or heard kissing babies, talking to little girls and signing decrees guaranteeing wage payments to state enterprises, whose workers have not received their pay for months. (After the election fever dies down, it will be back to non-payment as usual, but hey, that’s bourgeois electoral show business.) He also played to the Russian/Soviet nationalist gallery in all manner of symbolic ways, thereby stealing a march on Zyuganov.
Yeltsin also made peace overtures in a little place called Chechnya, whose blood-letting has been a major drain on his presidency. In fact, his initiatives have made little difference to the rate of killing there. Also, the anniversary of the 1962 Novocherkassk shootings took place during the election campaign (when Soviet troops fired on striking workers), and Yeltsin did his best to associate himself with the opponents of the bad old days. In reality, Yeltsin was an up-and-coming young member of the Communist Party bureaucracy back in 1962, but you would not think that to hear him now.
As for Yeltsin’s opponents, the Russian media tended to ignore them or be disparaging. Every possible attempt was made to link Zyuganov with the Soviet past. In fact, this probably helped maintain Zyuganov’s grip on the ‘nostalgia’ vote, but would have damaged him among younger voters. After the first round of the election, Yeltsin gravely warned against the threat of “revolution” if Zyuganov were to win the second round. If only. Zyuganov raised some eyebrows with his tendency to defend Stalin, but this did not contradict the essentially great-Russian-chauvinist rather than socialist nature of his campaign statements. At the end of the first round, Zyuganov polled about 32% of the vote. This amounted to a little under 24 million votes, a greater number than the population of most individual European countries.
The ‘kingmaker’ in the second round of the election looks like being General Aleksandr Lebed. He caused surprise by coming in third with 14%, and was being eagerly courted by both Yeltsin’s and Zyuganov’s followers in the post-election horsetrading. Lebed is the Clint Eastwood of the Russian elections. He has campaigned heavily on an anti-crime ticket and exploited his ‘distinguished’ record in the Afghan war and the 1992 fighting in Moldova. He admires the Chilean general Pinochet and may be tempted one day to imitate that butcher. He is now backing Yeltsin and has accepted a government post, but it is not clear how far his voters will take his advice.
As for the rest: the most pro-Western candidate, the liberal Grigory Yavlinsky, came a poor fourth, but he beat the ultra-nationalist buffoon, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. The latter’s support in earlier elections clearly went to others this time. The beneficiaries were probably Yeltsin, Zyuganov and Lebed. And Mikhail Gorbachev proved yet again that if you stay in the middle of the road you get run over. The Soviet Union supporters hate him because he presided over the USSR’s destruction, while the more anti-Soviet voters preferred Yeltsin and others. So Gorbachev got half of one per cent in the end.
The second round of the election is due some time in July, with Yeltsin and Zyuganov confronting one another. Yeltsin is likely to win more supporters of defeated candidates than Zyuganov will. The latter fought a vigorous, well organised campaign, but he fought on a very broad front in the first round and may have trouble broadening his support base any further.
The election showed that millions of Russians voted for a candidate bearing the communist label five years after the USSR’s collapse. However, as there was so little communist content in Zyuganov’s campaign, it is impossible to see it as a victory for the idea of socialism.
It is easy to despise Yeltsin, but Zyuganov is no ‘great red hope’.
Andrew MacKay