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In Case You
Missed It
Rescuing Boris
How Four U.S. Advisers Used Polls, Focus Groups,
Negative Ads and All the Other Techniques of American
Campaigning to Help Boris Yeltsin Win.
By Michael Kramer -
December 18,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Time"
-
Moscow - Monday,
July 15, 1996 - In the end the Russian people chose--and
chose decisively--to reject the past. Voting in the
final round of the presidential election last week, they
preferred Boris Yeltsin to his Communist rival Gennadi
Zyuganov by a margin of 13 percentage points. He is far
from the ideal democrat or reformer, and his lieutenants
Victor Chernomyrdin and Alexander Lebed are already
squabbling over power, but Yeltsin is arguably the best
hope Russia has for moving toward pluralism and an open
economy. By re-electing him, the Russians defied
predictions that they might willingly resubmit
themselves to communist rule.
The outcome was
by no means inevitable. Last winter Yeltsin's approval
ratings were in the single digits. There are many
reasons for his change in fortune, but a crucial one has
remained a secret. For four months, a group of American
political consultants clandestinely participated in
guiding Yeltsin's campaign. Here is the inside story of
how these advisers helped Yeltsin achieve the victory
that will keep reform in Russia alive.
All during the
long evening of Dec. 17, 1995, Felix Braynin sat
transfixed before a television set in the living room of
a government guest house in Moscow. He didn't like what
he saw. Returns from the elections for the Duma, the
lower house of Russia's parliament, represented a
devastating setback for reform-minded parties, including
the one linked to Boris Yeltsin. The Communists and
their allies were on their way to controlling the body,
a disturbing development because in six months Russians
would vote for President. Yeltsin's standing in the
polls was abysmal, a reflection of his brutal
misadventure in Chechnya; his increasing
authoritarianism; and his economic reform program, which
has brought about corruption and widespread suffering.
Considering the country's deep dislike of Yeltsin and
the Communists' surge, Braynin, a close friend of some
of Yeltsin's top aides, thought that something radical
had to be done.
A compact,
powerfully built former professional hockey and soccer
player in his native Belarus, Braynin, 48, had
immigrated to San Francisco in 1979. With $200 in his
pocket, he began painting houses. He is now a wealthy
management consultant who advises Americans interested
in investing in Russia.
Most of
Yeltsin's confidants believed the President would be
magically re-elected despite the Duma catastrophe, but
Braynin thought otherwise. The President, he reasoned,
could lose without the same kind of professional
assistance U.S. office seekers employ as a matter of
course. Braynin began a series of confidential
discussions with Yeltsin's aides, including one with
First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets, who at the
time was in charge of the President's nascent
re-election effort. Finally, in early February, Braynin
was instructed to "find some Americans" but to proceed
discreetly. "Secrecy was paramount," says Braynin.
"Everyone realized that if the Communists knew about
this before the election, they would attack Yeltsin as
an American tool. We badly needed the team, but having
them was a big risk."
To "find some
Americans," Braynin worked through Fred Lowell, a San
Francisco lawyer with close ties to California's
Republican Party. On Feb. 14, Lowell called Joe Shumate,
a G.O.P. expert in political data analysis who had
served as deputy chief of staff to California Governor
Pete Wilson. Since Wilson's drive for the 1996
Republican presidential nomination had ended almost
before it began, Lowell thought Shumate and George
Gorton, Wilson's longtime top strategist, might be
available to help Yeltsin. They were--and they
immediately enlisted Richard Dresner, a New York-based
consultant who had worked with them on many of Wilson's
campaigns.
Dresner had
another connection that would prove useful later on. In
the late 1970s and early '80s, he had joined with�Dick
Morris�to help Bill Clinton get elected Governor of
Arkansas. As Clinton's current political guru, Morris
became the middleman on those few occasions when the
Americans sought the Administration's help in Yeltsin's
re-election drive. So while Clinton was uninvolved with
Yeltsin's recruitment of the American advisers, the
Administration knew of their existence--and although
Dresner denies dealing with Morris, three other sources
have told Time that on at least two occasions the team's
contacts with Morris were "helpful."
A week after
the Valentine's Day call from Lowell, Dresner was in
Moscow. The Yeltsin campaign was at sea. Five
candidates, led by Communist Gennadi Zyuganov, were
ahead of Yeltsin in some polls. The President was
favored by only 6% of the electorate and was "trusted"
as a competent leader by an even smaller proportion. "In
the U.S.," says Dresner, "you'd advise a pol with those
kinds of numbers to get another occupation."
For two days
the supersecretive Yeltsin high command avoided Dresner,
and none of the team ever actually met the President.
"There are too many factions and too many leaks to risk
your dealing with him directly," Braynin explained to
Dresner. "You are our biggest secret."
Then, at 3 p.m.
on Feb. 27, Dresner met with Soskovets. In English, the
First Deputy Prime Minister asked, "How's our friend
Bill doing?" Most of the hour-long session was spent
discussing Clinton's re-election prospects. Dresner had
prepared a five-page proposal that called for the
Americans to "introduce your campaign staff to
sophisticated methods of message development, polling,
voter contact and campaign organization."
Soskovets had
already read Dresner's paper and pointed to a calendar
on his desk. The days remaining before the presidential
election's first round on June 16 were highlighted in
large, bold numbers. "There's not much time," he said.
"You are hired. I will tell the President that we have
the Americans." And then Soskovets ominously added a
thought that would reverberate in early May. Alluding to
Yeltsin's poor standing and the reluctance of his aides
ever to yield power to the Communists, Soskovets told
Dresner, "One of your tasks is to advise us, a month
from the election, about whether we should call it off
if you determine that we're going to lose."
To preserve
security, a contract was drawn between the International
Industrial Bancorp Inc. of San Francisco (a company
Braynin managed for its Moscow parent) and
Dresner-Wickers (Dresner's consulting firm in Bedford
Hills, New York). The Americans would work for four
months, beginning March 1. They would be paid $250,000
plus all expenses and have an unlimited budget for
polling, focus groups and other research. A week later,
they were working full time, but the boss was not
Soskovets.
Over the past
few months, the Russian and Western press have
identified six different people as Yeltsin's campaign
manager. In fact, the person really in charge was
Yeltsin's daughter Tatiana Dyachenko, 36, a computer
engineer with no previous political experience. While
those in the campaign's upper reaches have always known
that Dyachenko was the key cog in the apparatus--if only
because she alone saw the man she routinely calls "Papa"
on a daily basis--her role has been widely
misunderstood. After dodging the media for months,
Dyachenko last week described her job to the Russian
press: "I'm kind of involved in everything. I'm
everywhere--everywhere there's a weak link."
The history of
"Tatiana's emergence is really quite simple," explains
Valentin Yumachev, Yeltsin's close friend and
ghostwriter. "The President decided in February that the
campaign Soskovets was running was going nowhere. He
needed someone he could trust completely, and she was
it." None of Yeltsin's other senior campaign officials
was "what you would call pleased with Tatiana's
placement," adds Pavel Borodin, Yeltsin's Minister of
the Presidency, the government's general-services
manager. "But because she had no personal agenda they
couldn't plot against her. Her power obviously derived
from that, but also from her native intelligence and the
knowledge she gained from the Americans, who brought us
a professionalism and dispassion none of us was really
used to."
The American
team hired two young men, Braynin's son Alan and Steven
Moore, a public relations specialist from Washington, to
assist them, and promptly established its office in a
two-room suite at the President Hotel. The Americans
lived elsewhere in the hotel and were provided with a
car, a former KGB agent as a driver, and two bodyguards.
They were told they should assume that their phones and
rooms were bugged, that they should leave the hotel only
infrequently, and that they should avoid the campaign's
other staff members.
The Americans
managed to hide their identity for many months. In
interviewing various polling and focus-group companies
before hiring three, they described themselves as
representing Americans eager to sell thin-screen
televisions in Russia. "That story held for far longer
than it ever should have," says Shumate. The Americans
carried multiple-entry visas identifying them as working
for the "Administration of the President of the Russian
Federation," a bit of obviousness that constantly
threatened to undermine all the supposed secrecy
surrounding their real work.
The President
is not a normal hotel. It is owned by the office of the
President, and residence is by invitation only. A fence
surrounds the property, which is patrolled by police
armed with machine guns and wearing bulletproof vests.
When Dyachenko moved her own office to the hotel to be
near the Americans, the rest of the campaign took three
floors of offices there as well. Yeltsin's badly split
Russian advisers quickly set up separate fiefdoms on the
eighth, ninth and 10th floors. Dyachenko worked almost
exclusively on the 11th in Room 1119, directly across
the hall from the Americans in 1120. She and they shared
two secretaries, a translator, and fax, copying and
computer-printing machines.
By the end, the
team's office resembled a typical American campaign
headquarters. Soda bottles and old food shared space
with computer printouts. Graphs charting Yeltsin's
progress in the polls hung on the walls, and the entire
scene was dominated by a color-coded map of Russia with
Post-it notes describing the vote expected in the
nation's various regions. A safe stood unused, and
documents intended for a shredder remained intact, in
plain view.
Gorton followed
Dresner to Moscow and encountered in Dyachenko a shy,
intelligent and idealistic young woman who for some time
recoiled at even the most mild American-style dirty
trick. "But it wouldn't be fair," Gorton recalls her
saying when he advised that Zyuganov be trailed by
heckling "truth squads" designed to goad him into losing
his temper. At their first meeting across a long table
covered in green felt, Dyachenko confided, "I don't know
this business. I don't know what to ask." For a few
weeks, says Gorton, "the task was simple education,
Campaigning 101, stuff like the proper uses of polling
and the need to test via focus groups just about
everything the campaign was doing, or thinking of
doing."
Yeltsin's staff
brought a set of potentially disastrous biases to the
campaign. They thought the polls they read in the papers
were good enough to determine strategy, and because so
many of their allies had failed miserably in the Duma
elections despite spending huge sums on television
commercials, they believed political advertising was
useless in Russia.
But the polling
was inaccurate and unsophisticated and thus virtually
useless in determining how thematically to guide the
effort. "The pollsters asked mostly horse-race
questions," explains Dresner. "The focus-group operators
were in love with indirection and literally asked people
to answer questions like, 'If Yeltsin were a tree, what
kind of tree would he be?' We needed to know whether
voters would move to Yeltsin if he adopted a particular
policy, but for that crucial purpose the research in
hand was totally uninformative. As for the TV spots used
in the Duma elections, they were creative and pretty,
but they were far from hard-hitting. "All of that," says
Shumate, "had to be explained to a group of people who,
no matter their professed commitment to democracy, were
trapped in a classic Soviet mind-set. They thought they
could win simply by telling big shots like the directors
of factories to instruct their employees how to vote."
Starting from
scratch, Gorton calmly explained to Dyachenko that she
and her colleagues must suspend their beliefs. "You live
in Moscow and travel in the most elite circles," he
said. "Because you're smart, you are used to trusting
your instincts. You can't do that in this kind of work.
You have to know what the people you don't know are
thinking."
And then the
team went to work. A great deal of their communication
with Dyachenko and Yeltsin's other aides was conducted
by written memorandums. "Translation was a constant
problem," says Dresner. "We spent a full day trying to
convey what we meant by having Yeltsin stay 'on
message.'" Minister Borodin says, "Having the memos let
the President consider them calmly. We had many
discussions about the recommendations and in the end
adopted most everything the Americans advised."
One of the
team's first memos, designed to buy time for the
Americans as they gave themselves a crash course on
Russia, was titled "Why Bush Lost." Actually, the
parallels were eerie. George Bush's complacency almost
exactly resembled Yeltsin's. Like Bush's, the Yeltsin
team thought the nation's economy was improving and that
the President would receive credit for it; in fact, only
a small segment of the population enjoys whatever
progress there has been. Like Bush, Yeltsin simply
refused to believe that the voters would elect his
opponent. Like Bush's, the Yeltsin campaign was in
disarray as factions fought for control. And also as
with Bush, there was no clearly focused Yeltsin message,
just a melange of ideas--and even then, no disciplined
plan for their delivery or appreciation of the need for
such a plan.
Even a cursory
reading of the Russian press quickly convinced the
Americans that virtually the entire nation was furious
about the salaries government workers had been owed for
months on end. When Yeltsin's aides explained that the
President had already promised to correct the back-pay
problem, the droopy-eyed Dresner shook his head in
disbelief. "You can't just promise these things," he
told Dyachenko. "You have to do them. And then you have
to make sure the people know what you've done."
That remark
presaged a campaign-long insistence on a standard
American campaign practice--repetition. "Whatever it is
that we're going to say and do," Gorton explained to
Yeltsin's aides, "we have to repeat it between eight and
12 times." Those numbers were invented. "The Russians
believe that anything that's worthwhile is
scientifically based," says Shumate. "This gave us a leg
up when we started to seriously use focus groups to
guide campaign policy,�but right at the start it let us
pretend that we knew more than we really did. There's no
data supporting how many times something needs to be
repeated, but the Russians bought it as gospel."
With back pay
identified as among the most irksome issues, the team
advised that Yeltsin haul officials on the carpet for
failing to distribute the cash as he'd directed. The
President embraced that suggestion with relish, and the
press eagerly reported the boss's taking his
subordinates to task.
Clever as they
may have been, that and similar tactical strokes were
small beer. Yeltsin's problems were too big to be solved
simply by delivering what people knew was due them in
the first place. Even before their polling confirmed
their suspicions, the Americans intuited that Yeltsin
would lose and lose badly if the election were a
referendum on his stewardship. Most Russians, the polls
and focus groups found, perceived Yeltsin as a friend
who had betrayed them, a populist who had become
imperial. "Stalin had higher positives and lower
negatives than Yeltsin," says Dresner. "We actually
tested the two in polls and focus groups. More than 60%
of the electorate believed Yeltsin was corrupt; more
than 65% believed he had wrecked the economy. We were in
a deep, deep hole."
In one of the
team's early memos, a 10-page document dated March 2,
the Americans summed up the situation: "Voters don't
approve of the job Yeltsin is doing, don't think things
will ever get any better and prefer the Communists'
approach. There exists only one very simple strategy for
winning: first, becoming the only alternative to the
Communists; and second, making the people see that the
Communists must be stopped at all costs."
In hindsight,
the need for an anticommunist emphasis by the Yeltsin
campaign--the need to "go negative"--seems self-evident.
But when the Americans first harped on anticommunism as
the "only" route to victory, many in the campaign
resisted. And despite their status and patronage, the
Americans had to fight long and hard before that core
strategy was accepted. As Dyachenko told the team after
reading the memo, "We�have many factions and each has
its own view, but most everyone agrees that with
communism coming back all over Eastern Europe and with
Stalin's reputation rising here, a campaign based on
anticommunism is wrong for us."
The argument
over the campaign's central message raged all through
March. Matters finally came to a head in early April as
Yeltsin prepared to give a speech unveiling his campaign
program. That address was expected to signal the
campaign's substance and tone, and it became a major
battleground for control of the campaign. In a
nine-point memo dated April 2 that covered content,
theme and staging, the team wrote that the "overall goal
of the kickoff speech [should be] to demonstrate to the
average Russian that Yeltsin understands the suffering
the country has been going through...The President will
be talking to people in their homes through their TV
sets. These average people are the true audience. The
people in the hall are props. If this event is
successful, it will show that Yeltsin the politician is
guided by personal concerns that are in tune with those
of most other Russians."
The Americans
wanted a diverse audience, "not just middle-aged guys in
suits," as the memo put it. They wanted women and
students and popular officials like the mayor of Moscow
to stand by the President's side. "Too many Russians
believe Yeltsin is an isolated man who can't be trusted,
a man surrounded by a handful of advisers who have their
own agenda," the Americans explained. They also wanted a
brief speech that television viewers might actually sit
through. "No more than 15 minutes," they advised. And
they wanted Yeltsin to enter the hall through a large
and boisterous crowd that would mob him.
They got none
of it. Yeltsin spoke for almost an hour. Without so much
as a pat on the back, he strode to the stage to the
unenthusiastic, rhythmic clapping of middle-aged guys in
suits. More popular leaders did not stand beside him
because his Russian aides feared his being overshadowed.
He wandered across themes and left no one with a sense
of confidence. He was terrible. "The factions won," his
daughter told the team afterward. "They were scared of
the kind of things you recommended."
Angry about
losing the battle over the speech, and certain it
represented a disastrous trend in the campaign, the
Americans set out to prove their point after the fact.
They replayed excerpts of the address--and some other
film footage and still photographs of Yeltsin--for an
audience of 40 Russians wired to a "perception
analyzer," an instrument often used in the U.S.
Audiences have their hands on dials and are asked to
move them in different directions to indicate their
degree of interest and approval of what they are seeing
and hearing. An electronically produced chart records
their reactions.
The results
shocked Yeltsin's Russian assistants. Each time cameras
panned the stiff, unsmiling audience, the dials turned
down--as they also did when the President pledged to
improve people's lives. "The analyzer taught us that
Yeltsin should avoid promising anything," says Shumate.
"The country just didn't believe him."
Science "won
the day again," says Dresner. "We showed we'd been right
from the start." From then on, the American team's
influence grew--and anticommunism became the central and
repeated focus of the campaign and the candidate.
Having helped
establish the campaign's major theme, the Americans then
set out to modify it. The Americans used their
focus-group coordinator, Alexei Levinson, to determine
what exactly Russians most feared about the Communists.
Long lines, scarce food and renationalization of
property were frequently cited, but mostly people
worried about civil war. "That allowed us to move beyond
simple Red bashing," says Shumate. "That's why Yeltsin
and his surrogates and our advertising all highlighted
the possibility of unrest if Yeltsin lost. Many people
felt some nostalgia for what the communists had done for
Russia and no one liked the President--but they liked
the possibility of riots and class warfare even less."
"'Stick with Yeltsin and at least you'll have
calm'--that was the line we wanted to convey," says
Dresner. "So the drumbeat about unrest kept pounding
right till the end of the run-off round, when the final
TV spots were all about the Soviets' repressive rule."
In Video
International, the advertising firm hired before the
Americans arrived, Yeltsin had a first-rate team. The
series of 15 one-minute spots produced for airing before
the first-round balloting on June 16 was "at least as
good as most anything you could get in the West," says
Dresner. "Showing average Russians grudgingly coming to
the realization that they had to support Yeltsin was the
only way to move people who essentially wished the
President was out of their lives."
The Americans
were "vital," says Mikhail Margolev, who coordinated the
Yeltsin account at Video International. Margolev had
worked for five years in two American advertising
agencies but freely acknowledges that his methods are
still influenced by his earlier tenure as a propaganda
specialist for the Soviet Communist Party and as an
undercover KGB agent masquerading as a journalist for
TASS, the Russian news agency. "The Americans helped
teach us Western political-advertising techniques," says
Margolev, "and most important, they caused our work to
be accepted because they were the only ones really close
to Tatiana. She was the key. The others in the campaign
were like snakes, and snakes, you know, often eat each
other. Putting his daughter in to get things done was
Yeltsin's smartest move, and she was clearly leaning on
the Americans."
The TV ad the
Americans most wanted was the one the campaign made
last, which had Yeltsin himself speaking. "We actually
wanted him in every spot," says Gorton. "After all those
great ads with average folks talking about their lives
and then about Yeltsin, we wanted the President to come
on and say that he understood what they were talking
about, that he heard their complaints, that he felt
their pain." But Yeltsin resisted--and that caused the
team to reach out to Bill Clinton's all-purpose
political aide, Dick Morris.
Communicating
in code--Clinton was called the Governor of California,
Yeltsin the Governor of Texas--the Americans sought
Morris' help. They had earlier worked together to script
Clinton's summit meeting with Yeltsin in mid-April. The
main goal then was to have Clinton swallow hard and say
nothing as Yeltsin lectured him about Russia's
great-power prerogatives. "The idea was to have Yeltsin
stand up to the West, just like the Communists insisted
they would do if Zyuganov won," says a Clinton
Administration official. "By having Yeltsin posture
during that summit without Clinton's getting bent out of
shape, Yeltsin portrayed himself as a leader to be
reckoned with. That helped Yeltsin in Russia, and we
were for Yeltsin."
The American
team wanted Clinton to call Yeltsin to urge that he
appear in his ads. The request reached Clinton--that
much is known--but no one will say whether the call was
made. Yet it was not long before Yeltsin finally
appeared on the tube. That was the good news--the bad
news was that the spot was awful. With all three of the
American principals out of the country (the only time
that happened during their employment), Video
International dealt with Yeltsin on its own. Gorton had
written several memos detailing how the shoot should
proceed. Yeltsin, he said, should be filmed for at least
four hours over several days, with the best 15 or 30
seconds culled for airing. "Even a former actor like
Ronald Reagan would never attempt so important a task
with less time and preparation devoted to the job,"
Gorton advised.
But it was not
to be. "You'd have to say we were a bit reluctant to
push the President," says Margolev. So at 6 one morning,
after Yeltsin had slept barely three hours, Video
International taped him for about 40 minutes. The
finished commercial had Yeltsin speaking for more than
two minutes. He looked exhausted. "It was ridiculous,"
says Shumate. "Here you have a guy whose health is a
major issue, and his fitness to serve is called into
question by his very own television spot."
Yeltsin also
had problems with his regular TV coverage, even though
he essentially controlled the state-run networks. As
late as March, the news shows continued to criticize the
President mercilessly, a favorite target being the war
in Chechnya. "It was ludicrous to control the two major
nationwide television stations and not have them bend to
your will," says Dresner. In writing, the team adopted a
more diplomatic tone. "Wherever an event is held," they
wrote, "care should be taken to notify the state-run TV
and radio stations to explain directly the event's
significance and how we want it covered." Beginning in
April, Russia's television became a virtual arm of the
Yeltsin campaign, a crucial change that actually came
fairly easily. With none of the more democratic
candidates breaking through in the polls, most Russian
journalists came to regard Yeltsin as the only effective
bulwark against the Communists--and thus the best
guarantor of their own careers.
What really
caused surprise was the public's reaction to the biased
reporting. "We focus-grouped the issue several times,"
says Shumate. The results were contained in a June 7
wrap-up memo on TV coverage. Only 28% of respondents
said the media were very biased in Yeltsin's favor--a
group that consisted mostly of Zyuganov's partisans.
Twenty-nine percent said the media were "somewhat
biased," but they broke in Yeltsin's favor. Amazingly,
27% said they thought the media were biased against
Yeltsin.
Each day
brought decisions on details that required careful
thought and management. The Americans advised on staging
crowds (and government employees were regularly
instructed to attend Yeltsin's rallies). They conceived
Russia's first-ever serious direct-mail effort (a letter
from Yeltsin to Russian veterans thanking them for their
service). They designed a campaign to use Yeltsin's wife
Naina on the stump, where she was regularly well
received. And they fought continuously all suggestions
that Yeltsin debate Zyuganov. "He would have lost,"
Gorton says simply.
While the team
dreaded the possibility of Yeltsin's being lured into
debating Zyuganov, two greater threats loomed in early
May. The Americans had been hoping to ignore Soskovets'
instructions to signal a possible loss so that the
elections could be canceled or delayed, but the issue
was forced on May 5 when Yeltsin's closest aide, General
Alexander Korzhakov, suggested a postponement.
Gorton had felt
it coming and "for the first time ever," he says, "I
wrote that an election was in the bag. No caveats,
nothing about the trend looking good. I just flat out
said you could take it to the bank. Actually, at that
point, we had Yeltsin up by about 10 points. It
certainly wasn't in the bag, but we didn't want the
balloting disrupted. We might have fudged a bit if our
numbers were close, but we didn't have to. Back then, we
really thought we'd win comfortably."
Yeltsin scolded
Korzhakov and said the election would be held on
schedule. At the same time, he suggested that others
besides Korzhakov believed a communist victory could
provoke a civil war. That comment was widely interpreted
as signaling that Yeltsin might indeed be planning to
follow Korzhakov's advice later on. In fact, it was part
of the strategy to make re-electing the President look
like the best way for Russians to avoid chaos.
The only
drawback of the team's encouraging analysis was that
Yeltsin took it too much to heart. "When he said he was
confident that he'd win the election outright in the
first round by capturing 50% of the vote, it told us
again that you can only lead politicians so far," says
Dresner. "The only real threat to victory was a low
turnout, and Yeltsin helped depress it by giving voters
a reason to take the day off. If they thought Yeltsin's
victory was a done deal, as he himself had indicated,
why bother voting?"
The other
crisis had been percolating for some time. The
President's three democratic opponents had long talked
of coalescing behind one or the other of them, and the
speculation reached a fever pitch at the beginning of
May. Had "they managed that," says Gorton, "it could
really have killed us." A good deal of time was devoted
to strategizing about how Yeltsin could stop the
so-called "third force" from emerging. The two key
third-force players were Grigori Yavlinsky, the leading
democrat in the race, and the war hero Alexander Lebed.
The team advised Yeltsin to woo his opponents publicly
in order to boost their already inflated egos. "We
thought that once they enjoyed the limelight, neither
would be willing to drop out in favor of the other,"
Shumate explains. "Having them all in the race prevented
the rise of a single, democratic alternative to
Yeltsin."
Keeping Lebed
as an independent candidate was considered especially
critical--unless he dropped out of the first round in
favor of Yeltsin, which seemed highly unlikely. "All the
data suggested that if Lebed withdrew to join a
third-force coalition, his supporters would defect to
Zyuganov," says Gorton. Thus on May 5, the Americans
wrote that "Lebed would be the strongest third-force
threat, and we believe paying a significant price for
his support would be well worth it." The Americans
didn't know that other Yeltsin aides were already
reportedly aiding Lebed financially and logistically.
"All we did advise," says Dresner, "is that if and when
Lebed joined with Yeltsin, he not be given a government
position until after the election was decided. Our
polling showed that about 2% of voters would shy away
from Yeltsin if that happened. On that point, we were
ignored." Lebed won a startling 15% of the first-round
vote, and in a dramatic move, Yeltsin almost immediately
thereafter appointed him his national security adviser.
According to an exit poll, 56% of those who voted for
Lebed in the first round voted for Yeltsin in the
runoff."
June 16 was a
horrific day. As the first-round vote approached,
Yeltsin's support softened. It had been built up,
virtually a point at a time, over three months. It was
eroding now as Lebed gained. The Americans' private
polls indicated only a 5-point lead for Yeltsin over
Zyuganov. The two candidates who received the most votes
in the first round would go to the runoff, and Yeltsin
was almost certain to make the cut. Finishing second to
Zyuganov would be a stunning blow to his momentum. A low
turnout could produce exactly that result, and the first
indications signaled a turnout below expectations.
The team
members paced nervously in Room 1120. Gorton damned
Yeltsin for ever predicting outright victory in the
first round. Braynin wondered if the low turnout was
owing to Russians' watching the Germany-Russia soccer
match, and the four argued about whether Russia's defeat
would cause voters to hit the vodka bottle rather than
vote during the two hours remaining before the polls
closed in the country's western region. "We peaked too
soon," Dresner screamed. Only Shumate seemed cool. He
had long before concluded that Zyuganov would never get
more than 32% of the vote in the first round--the
combined total the Communists and their ideological soul
mates had reached in the December 1995 Duma election.
"This stinks," Dresner repeated every few minutes as he
checked the turnout around the nation. "It won't fall
below 65%, and our model shows we win with that,"
answered Shumate, who then left with his wife Joyce to
attend a production of La Traviata at the Bolshoi
Theatre.
A bit of relief
came when a CNN correspondent reported that "the only
thing voters we've spoken with like less than Yeltsin is
the prospect of upheaval." Dresner howled. "It worked,"
he shouted. "The whole strategy worked. They're scared
to death!" After months being cooped up in the President
Hotel wearing blue jeans, sneakers and PETE WILSON FOR
PRESIDENT T shirts, the Americans headed for the
building where Russia's central election commission
would be announcing the results as they came in. "The
hell with security," Dresner said. "I want to see this."
And there they sat near the back of the auditorium, six
guys in suits with computer projections in their hands
and a lap-top computer. The place was overrun with
reporters, but Yeltsin's secret American advisers were
never recognized.
The final tally
for the first round showed that Yeltsin had edged out
Zyuganov 35% to 32% (the Communists had indeed been held
to the level they reached in December). Gorton began
drafting a memo designed to guide Yeltsin's remarks, and
Dresner began plotting 20 emergency focus groups to
determine what voters were thinking. In less than an
hour, another memo was written urging the quickest
possible runoff date. "We've got to try and keep
Zyuganov from capitalizing" on the first round's
surprise tightness, Shumate said. "July 3 would be
good," said Gorton. "That's about as soon as possible,
and it's in the middle of the week so that people will
be in town rather than at their dachas." "We need
turnout," Dresner said over and over. "We've got to have
turnout."
Why, with
unlimited funds, expert advice and the media in his
pocket, did Yeltsin win the first round by only three
points? The Americans identify several points:
--The
continuing underlying hostility toward Yeltsin. "He
never overcame the fact that most Russians can't stand
him," says Dresner. "Anyone but a communist would
probably have beaten him."
--Zyuganov
succeeded in softening his image despite numerous
self-inflicted mistakes. "He said some really scary
things to appease his hard-core backers and ensure that
they voted," says Gorton. "If he had moved more astutely
to broaden his base and if he'd aped Clinton and said,
'It's the economy, stupid,' he might have pulled it
off."
--A slackening
of the Yeltsin campaign's anticommunist message in the
last 10 days. The Americans had advised "that you cannot
hit hard enough, or long enough, the idea of the
communists' bringing civil unrest if they win." In the
first round, says Shumate, "the repetition lesson never
took completely."
--Yeltsin's
attendance at rock concerts and other frivolous events.
"We needed to reach young voters," Dresner says, "but
our photo-op lectures were taken to an extreme. A
disturbing dissonance was created. You shouldn't have
the President out there dancing and prancing if your
main message is that the country is going to dissolve
into chaos if the other guy wins. Either you run a
serious-business campaign seriously, or you don't."
--Yeltsin's
prediction of a first-round victory so huge that a
runoff wouldn't be necessary. "Believe what you want,"
says Dresner, "but there is never any justification for
hype like that unless you're out to depress the turnout,
which is the exact opposite of what we were trying to
do."
The first
round's closeness guaranteed that the two-week runoff
campaign would be conducted with care, regardless of the
predictions that Yeltsin couldn't lose. The Americans'
insistence on the anticommunist message was pursued with
a vengeance. At the end, Yeltsin's television
advertising was almost exclusively a nonstop diet of
past Soviet horrors. Lebed's law-and-order theme
dovetailed nicely with the pre-existing Yeltsin emphasis
on preserving stability. Several bogus poll predictions
were put forth to make the race seem close and thus
increase turnout. Everything clicked except for
Yeltsin's health, which naturally was barely covered by
the pro-Yeltsin media. The press resumed its criticism
of the President following his victory last Wednesday,
but until then the media had been positively slavish
about following the campaign's injunction: "Not a word
about bad things."
The Americans
claim no special knowledge about the President's illness
or its severity and are unconcerned about the course of
Yeltsin's second term and whoever will finally emerge as
its key players. "We were brought in to help win," says
Gorton, "and that's what we did. The Russians are
prideful and say that people like us won't be necessary
in the future because they've learned what to do. You
hear that everywhere after the hired guns have done
their work--and it may be true. All I know is that for
every guy who thinks he can go it alone, there will
always be another guy who knows he can't."
Last week
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. But just as in America, the
consultants can only take Yeltsin so far.
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
not necessarily reflect Information Clearing House
editorial policy. |
