Even his supporters have misgivings about his run for re-election. His wife, Naina, has made no secret of her opposition. “In personal terms, as a brother, I’d prefer he wouldn’t run and got some rest,” says Yeltsin’s younger brother, Mikhail, a retired construction foreman. He adds loyally: “But who else is there?” Anyone but Boris, many Russians would say. When Yeltsin announced his candidacy in Yekaterinburg last week, even a hometown crowd couldn’t muster much enthusiasm. “He’s from here, but we need someone new,” said Yulia Abramova, a journalism student at Urals State University. “Everyone has a mission in life, and Yeltsin has fulfilled his.”
Yet the politician most likely to beat Yeltsin is even less committed to democratic reforms; he’s the day-before-yesterday’s man. Gennady Zyuganov, 51, leader of the resurgent Communist Party, declared his own candidacy last week. Zyuganov is a lackluster campaigner, a stolid apparatchik who says he wants to create a new Soviet Union by “voluntary” means. Many Russians have no desire to restore communist rule, or the Soviet empire. But Zyuganov has caught the country’s mood – the disenchantment with reform, the yearning for a firm hand. “People in Russia have only three rights,” he charged last week. “The right to steal. The right to get drunk. And the right to have no responsibility for anything.” The polls give Zyuganov a strong lead over Yeltsin. In one study, scheduled for release this week by the Brookings Institution in Washington, 60 percent of the Russians surveyed last December said they were worse off than in previous years, and only 10 percent thought their country was going in the right direction.
Officially, support for Yeltsin overseas hasn’t wavered, if only because the alternative seems worse. The State Department complains that neither the communists nor the ultranationalists led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, another candidate, “represent a future that is democratic or reform-oriented.” But to some, Yeltsin now fails the same test. In a New York Times op-ed article last week, Anders Aslund, the Swedish economist who once advised Russia’s government, called for “a fundamental Western reassessment of President Boris Yeltsin, because he has abandoned everything that the West appreciated in him.”
Vyacheslav Kostikov, Yeltsin’s former press secretary and author of a new book on the president, said in a television interview earlier this month that Yeltsin lacks strong democratic convictions. “Power is his ideology, his friend, his concubine, his mistress, his passion,” Kostikov charged. “Everything that goes beyond the struggle for power concerns him much less.” Kostikov was immediately fired from his job as Russian ambassador to the Vatican.
To retain his grip on power, Yeltsin evidently plans to co-opt the populist themes that helped the communists win last December’s parliamentary elections. In Yekaterinburg, he promised more money for back wages and increased social spending. He also announced the indictment of top officials on corruption charges and lectured the local governor on the need to punish factory managers who get rich while their workers go unpaid. And he promised to end the war in Chechnya “within months” – though his call for the execution of Chechen leaders did not seem conducive to a quick political settlement. Yeltsin also made it clear, again, that he would punish anyone who makes him look bad. Last week he fired the head of RTR, a state broadcast network, which has shown increasing independence in its news coverage; Yeltsin accused it of reporting “a lot of rubbish.”
It isn’t clear that Yeltsin’s health is up to another five-year term. He has had two heart attacks, and it took him two months to recuperate from the second one, last October. U.S. sources say he needs bypass surgery, which he has postponed until after the election. Campaigning in Yekaterinburg, he quickly became hoarse and had to struggle to croak out the first words of his announcement speech. He also went off on strange, rambling digressions. At one point, Yeltsin suggested that unmarried female workers at a local candy factory be introduced to men from nearby military schools. “And babies will be quick to appear,” he promised.
Yeltsin’s opponents in June will include firebrand Zhirinovsky, liberal economist Grigory Yavlinsky and retired Gen. Aleksandr Lebed, another nationalist. But the communists are better organized and more unified than the other parties. To soothe the West, Zyuganov tries to come across as a moderate. At a meeting of capitalist movers and shakers in Switzerland two weeks ago, he called himself “the most peaceful man on the planet.” He promised not to reverse the privatization begun by the reformers. “We understand that if we start taking factories back, there’s going to be shooting from Murmansk to Vladivostok,” he said. But in Russia, Zyuganov blames all of the country’s economic problems on post-communist reform, not on the failings of Soviet planning. His party wants to keep key industries nationalized. It has adopted almost none of the social-democratic trappings assumed by former communists in Poland and Hungary; unlike them, the party still proudly calls itself communist.
Hoping to survive the first round of the election and face Zyuganov in a runoff, Yeltsin will present himself as the lesser of evils – the best rating he can hope for. He will try to appease both his hard-line critics and his recently disappointed liberal supporters. “I am for reforms, but not at any price,” he said last week. “I am for correcting the course, not for backtracking on it.” There is not much his backers in the West can do to affect the outcome. Like his reluctant supporters in Russia, they can only hope he will keep his promise about reform if he wins. If he loses, a White House official says philosophically, “there are communists, and there are communists. Yeltsin used to be a communist.” And later, he used to be a democrat. The question is, if he’s re-elected, what will he be next?
