Russia

If 1995 had been disappointing, 1996 was hardly better. Russia’s gross national product fell by 6 per cent that year — the fifth consecutive year it had fallen. Total production was half of what it had been in 1990, and the government was able to collect only 65 per cent of the taxes due to it. In 1988-9 it had withdrawn Soviet forces from Afghanistan, but now, seven years later, Russia had commitments there again, backing at least one faction in the north; the war in Chechnya ground expensively on; and NATO proceeded with its plan for eastward expansion to Russia’s frontiers. Having received no pay for five months, the miners of Vorkutka finally went on strike; Russia was forced to conclude an agreement with France, undertaking to compensate the descendants of those who had invested in Russian bonds since 1830; the police registered 574 contract killings, of which only 64 were solved; and the Vatican, egged on by Cardinal Ratzinger, launched a missionizing campaign to give desperate Russians the consolation of the Catholic Church. ¹⁶ There were, it is true, some more promising developments. Inflation was cut to 22 per cent a year, and the tax police became more aggressive in pursuing defaulters; the state’s traditional money-spinner, the liquor monopoly, was restored; and several Central Asian states drew closer to Russia for fear of the Taliban. As in the early seventeenth century, the Catholic missionizing campaign met with obdurate, though less violent, resistance, and public opinion began to call for the state to reassert itself. ¹⁷

Since it was also an election year, policy sails were trimmed accordingly. The loss of an entire armoured regiment, ambushed in a mountain pass by Chechen guerrillas led by an Arab incomer called Khattab, ¹⁸ hastened a resolution and in April 1996 the war was brought to an uneasy end. Dudaev himself was killed by Russian special forces on the last day of that month. The following January Asian Maskhadov was elected to replace him. But he proved unable to control either the Muslim fundamentalists organizing for war or the Chechen gangs, whose kidnapping targets soon included schoolchildren and British communication workers. Maskhadov subsequently accused Boris Berezovskii of abetting the kidnappers by arranging ransom payments to them. Whether this allegation was true or not, Berezovskii’s contacts fitted him for the role, ¹⁹ and he was also to play a key role in Yeltsin’s re-election.

Despite growing indifference to the democratic process, opinion polls suggested that the President’s chances were poor, and so he thought of postponing the election. The Chechen war had brought no glory; the scandalous shares-for-loans scheme had necessitated the dismissal of Ana-tolii Chubais, the key official in charge of the privatization programme; and Yeltsin’s own health was deteriorating. His drinking problem became all too obvious on an official visit to Germany, and he was developing serious heart problems. Nevertheless, he had a small number of very powerful political helpers, all of them beneficiaries of privatization, and all of them terrified that a resurgent Communist Party might gain an electoral victory and destroy their business empires. Berezovskii brought them together to fund Yeltsin’s re-election campaign; Chubais was drafted in to be campaign manager, and Yeltsin’s daughter was included in the committee to ensure ready communication with the President’s office. ²⁰

The law limited funding for every presidential candidate to $3 million, but Yeltsin’s re-election committee soon gathered at least $500 million and perhaps as many as $1 billion. ²¹ Those who contributed were to be richly rewarded for their generosity. The Communist campaign could count on up to 500,000 workers, but it could not get access to television in order to transmit its message. Yeltsin, on the other hand, enjoyed a virtual monopoly of television exposure. Leading American and British public-relations and advertising experts were also recruited to help his campaign. Everything was done to promote a favourable image of the President; every dirty trick was used against his Communist rival, Gennadii Ziuganov. Soft-sell, sentimental advertisements were particularly effective and teams of hecklers went everywhere that Ziuganov went, in order to disrupt his meetings. When a bomb killed four people in the Moscow metro the Communists were blamed and the electorate was invited to vote for Yeltsin, civic peace and stability. On 3 July Yeltsin won the second round of voting with 54 per cent of the poll. This was not an overwhelming endorsement, even though the election had been a travesty of constitutional democratic process. However, relieved that the Communists had been defeated, Western governments did not protest.