Yeltsin - 1996 Election
The Constitution provides citizens with the right to change their government, and citizens exercised this right in practice parliamentary elections in December 1995 and in presidential elections in July 1996, both of which domestic and international observers declared to be generally free and fair.
The United States helped Russia improve its election administration through a USAID grant to the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES). This 3-year, $10.7 million regional grant enabled IFES to work in any country of the former Soviet Union, provided it has U.S. and host country approval. In Russia, the IFES project objectives were to help make elections free and fair and increase public participation.
The purpose of the U.S.-funded independent media program in Russia was to ensure the quality and self-sufficiency of nongovernment or independent media organizations so that the Russian people have access to truthful information and a forum for open expression. U.S. media projects seek to raise the reporting skills of journalists, provide training in business and marketing to media managers, donate equipment and broadcast material, and facilitate sharing of news information.
After more than four years of market reforms, the communist party in Russia made a comeback by winning a majority of seats in the Russian Duma in the December 1995 election. In the run-up to the 1996 presidential election in Russia, some opinion polls put Yeltsin in fifth place among the presidential candidates, with only 8% support. The most popular candidate in Russia, by a wide margin, was the Communist Party’s Gennady Zyuganov.
The drama unfolding in Moscow was a struggle inside the old communist power elite: The higher echelons of the communist nomenklatura support Boris Yeltsin, the lower, Genadi Zyuganov. The squabble was over ownership of state property. They control state wealth by holding on to power. The old nomenklatura over the past two years grabbed state property for itself; they own the banks, they own the industries. Prime minister Victor Chernomyrdin, for example, controlled Gazprom, the energy conglomerate.
Zyuganov spent less than three million dollars on his campaign. Estimates of Yeltsin’s spending, by contrast, range from $700 million to $2.5 billion. (David M. Kotz, Russia’s Path from Gorbachev to Putin, 2007). In February 1996, at the urging of the US, the International Monetary Fund supplied a $10.2 billion “emergency infusion” to Russia. Campaign strategists for the former Republican governor of California Pete Wilson set up shop in the President Hotel in Moscow, where they served as Yeltsin’s “secret campaign weapon” to save Russia for Democracy (Eleanor Randolph, “Americans Claim Role in Yeltsin Win,” L.A. Times, 9 July 1996).
The Communist campaign concentrated solely on door-to-door campaigning rather than sophisticated media placements--they lost the old-fashioned way. Zyuganov also failed to extend his political base beyond the elderly, poor, and rural voters. Rather than try to sway voters in the middle of the spectrum, Zyuganov insisted on preaching to the choir and did not soften his hard-edged message. Neither did he separate himself from some of his Stalinists allies in the Communist camp.
Some of Zyuganov's protests were quite valid. Yeltsin, for example, did dominate the mass media. He also mobilized government personnel and funds to stage a meteoric rise in his popularity ratings from single digits in early 1996. And there were credible charges that he exceeded the legal limits for campaign financing. Yeltsin defeated Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov with the financial backing of powerful business magnates, who used the media empires they controlled to ensure victory.
A democratic election for the President of the Russian Federation took place in July for the first time in the history of Russia as an independent state. President Yeltsin was reelected on July 3 with 54 percent in the second round in a generally free and fair election. Yeltsin took the oath of office as the first popularly elected President of Russia in its 1,000-year history.
Michael Kramer reported that "Russia took a historic step away from its totalitarian past. Democracy triumphed--and along with it came the tools of modern campaigns, including the trickery and slickery Americans know so well. If those tools are not always admirable, the result they helped achieve in Russia surely is."
The level of open political debate was unprecedented in Russia’s history. The nearly 70 percent voter turnout underscored the progress made in defining Russia as a democratic nation. But the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) found that the technical election procedures have shown continuing improvement since 1993. While concluding that the elections were generally free and fair, OSCE representatives expressed concern about biased election coverage in state-owned media and scattered irregularities in some areas, such as illegal proxy voting. The Central Electoral Commission (CEC) and the court system have ruled on charges of fraud against regional election officials, and the CEC reprimanded candidates for violating prohibitions on early campaigning.
Not a single member of Yegor Gaidar's original team of reformers, which joined the Russian government in November 1991, now remained in the cabinet. The young Russian democrats had been eliminated, neutralized or forced into an alliance with Yeltsin. The old ruling elite tossed out its party card and rules the country under the guise of democracy.
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