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Democracy Moves Forward in Russia

In a historic runoff election, incumbent Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin defeated his Communist challenger, Gennady Zyuganov, on July 3, 1996. More than just a personal victory for Yeltsin, the election was a boost for democracy in Russia. It marked the first time—in more than 1000 years of history—that an independent Russia has allowed the people to choose their head of government in an open, contested election. For centuries Russia was ruled by czars, who inherited their autocratic powers. Then, from 1917 to 1991, Russia was governed under a system of one-party Communist rule. Although democracy remains a fledgling concept in Russia, Yeltsin's win does much to point Russia in the direction of democratic and free market reforms.

Superficially, presidential elections in Russia and the United States bear a strong resemblance, but a closer look reveals major differences. American presidential elections have occurred every four years since 1788, but this is the first time Russia as an independent country has had such an election. Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian republic in 1991, but at that time Russia was still part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Moreover, while a candidate for president of the United States can win by a plurality, the Russian constitution provides for a runoff election if no candidate receives 50 percent plus one vote of those cast or if fewer than 50 percent of those eligible to vote cast ballots. In addition, the 1996 vote for president in Russia was held six months after the vote for the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament. In the United States the elections for president and Congress are held simultaneously, although congressional elections are also held in two-year cycles between presidential elections.

Prior to the first round of voting, several Yeltsin supporters proposed that the election scheduled for June 16, 1996, be postponed—especially when it looked like Yeltsin might not win. No one has ever seriously proposed such a postponement in the United States.

There are also significant differences between how Americans and Russians conduct election campaigns. Sometimes the differences are not obvious. For example, television plays an important role in Russia as well as in the United States. But in the United States there are well-established, if not ideal, rules governing access and equal time for all candidates.

The practice in Russia is very different. During the recent campaign, a visitor to Moscow, the Russian capital, could have easily come away convinced that there was only one candidate running. With few minor exceptions, the newspaper and television news coverage—both the two state-controlled networks and the one privately owned network—focused almost entirely on Yeltsin. Before the June 16 primary, for example, Moskovskii Komsomlets, one of the most popular so-called “democratic” papers, carried a banner headline stating “We are all voting for Yeltsin.”

Typical evening television news coverage began with as much as ten minutes devoted to what Yeltsin did during the day, no matter how trivial. Only then did television report on the election, which of course again featured Yeltsin. Nor were there any debates involving Yeltsin and Zyuganov, the main candidates. Like the one-sided news coverage, the lack of debates served to limit Zyuganov's exposure to the public. When TV did feature other candidates, the reports were almost always brief and usually negative. For example, during a June 25 interview with rural voters, the commentator noted that those farmers who had supported Yeltsin during the first round of voting had fields that were orderly and robust—unlike farmers in neighboring areas, who, the correspondent noted, had voted for Zyuganov and whose fields were untended and ill-kept.

Democracy is not yet an iron-clad tradition in Russia. When Yeltsin was doing poorly in pre-election polls, some democrats feared that he would refuse to turn over power if he lost. Such concerns were heightened after some of Yeltsin's closest advisers called for the postponement or cancellation of the election.

Interestingly, the Russian election focused much more on ideology and substantial differences in policies, than do most American elections. Although the Republican and Democratic parties each try to convince U.S. voters that the election of the other party will result in a radically different program from their own, for the most part U.S. elections lack rigid ideological differences. That was not the case in Russia. While there were several candidates fighting for the middle ground, the issues separating the Communists and Yeltsin were black-and-white, polar opposites. The Communists envisaged a return to state control of major industries and raw materials, with central planning of the economy. Presumably there would also be an increase in police monitoring and control. By contrast, Yeltsin sought to avoid a return to the past. Admittedly, as the election neared, Yeltsin moved to attract Zyuganov's supporters by promising a crackdown on crime and corruption, as well as increased state control, protectionism, and antiforeign restrictions. Nonetheless, important differences between the candidates remained.

Unlike American elections, the Russian procedures allow a voter to mark his or her ballot “no.” That means the voter opposes all the candidates. In some local elections, “no” votes have prevented a candidate from winning the necessary 50 percent of the ballots and thus forced a runoff. But faced with such clear choices, relatively few Russians voted “no” in either round of the presidential balloting. In the June 16 round, only 1.54 percent, or 1,163,921 voters, chose the “no” option; that number increased to 4.8 percent, or 3.6 million, in the runoff on July 3.

During his 1991 campaign for president of the Russian republic, Yeltsin faced five other candidates. They were Vadim Bakatin, a member of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's USSR presidential council; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a right-wing conservative; Albert Makashov, a right-wing general; Nikolai Ryzhkov, the former chairman of the Soviet Union Council of Ministers; and Aman-Geldy Tuleyev, a Communist who shared many of the views later to be put forward by Zyuganov. Despite the six-way contest, Yeltsin managed to poll 57.3 percent, or 45,552,041 votes, and thus avoided a runoff. Except for U.S. presidential candidates Richard Nixon, who received 47.2 million votes in 1972, Ronald Reagan, who received 54 million votes in 1984, and George Bush, with 48.9 million votes in 1988, no other leader in history had ever attracted so many votes in a free, fair, multicandidate election.

Yeltsin was not nearly as successful in 1996. Although he ran ahead of everyone else, not only did he fail to reach 50 percent of the votes cast in the first round, but also he received only slightly less than three-fifths of the votes he had attracted five years earlier. In the runoff on July 3 he did much better, of course, receiving 40,208,384, or 53.8 percent of the votes. Yet the contrast between the 1991 election and the first round of 1996 voting suggested the public had lost its enthusiasm for Yeltsin. He received 5 million fewer votes than he did in 1991. As one Russian voter put it, “When I cast my vote for Yeltsin, I am not voting for him but against the other candidates.”

Eleven candidates managed to collect the one million signatures needed to qualify as candidates in the first round of the 1996 election. Most of the 11 were not nominated by a political party. Only Vladimir Zhirinovsky of the Liberal Democratic Party, Grigory Yavlinsky of the Yabloko (Apple) Party, and Gennady Zyuganov of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation had political organizations behind them. At that, only Zyuganov's Communist Party, with 500,000 members, had a grass-roots organization of the sort most Americans associate with a party organization, and only it had workers at the precinct level. Yeltsin himself sought to remain above the battle and did not represent a party as such. However, Russia Our Home, a party created by Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin to contest the December 1995 election to the Duma, unofficially worked on Yeltsin's behalf.

According to the official results of the first round, about 74.5 million votes were cast, or 69.8 percent of eligible voters, a higher percentage than in U.S. presidential elections, where the turnout has averaged 52 percent over the last 3 elections. About 35 percent of Russian voters, or 26,665,495, voted for Yeltsin. Second—and therefore a finalist with Yeltsin in the July 3 runoff—was the Communist candidate, Zyuganov, with 32 percent, or 24,211,686 votes. Finishing third was former General Aleksandr Lebed, regarded by many Russians as a hero of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan's civil war (1979-1989), an outspoken critic of crime and corruption, and an ardent nationalist. Lebed attracted 14.5 percent, or 10,974,736 votes, a surprising showing in that the polls failed to predict such support and because he had no party working on his behalf.

Rumors circulated that the Yeltsin campaign committee had quietly provided financial support for Lebed in an effort to attract nationalists and adherents of law and order away from Zyuganov and Zhirinovsky. Shortly after the first round, Yeltsin met with Lebed and announced a political alliance. While Lebed acknowledged that not all of his supporters would switch their allegiance to Yeltsin, there was good reason to believe that enough would do so to provide Yeltsin with the margin of victory in the runoff. To prove that this was not just a token marriage, Yeltsin fired Minister of Defense Pavel Grachev, a longtime adversary and rival of Lebed, and appointed Lebed head of national security. Yeltsin's actions and words gave unmistakable signals that he wanted Lebed to succeed him as president.

The Lebed-initiated firing of three other hard-liners—Alexander Korzhakov, Yeltsin's personal bodyguard; Mikhail Barsukov, the head of the security agency that was once called the KGB; and Oleg Soskovetz, the first deputy prime minister in charge of the economy—followed. Given that the widely detested and feared Korzhakov was nonetheless Yeltsin's closest friend and confidant, the dismissal seemed to indicate that Lebed had enormous influence with Yeltsin. Subsequently, however, it appeared that Korzhakov was allowed to remain in his Kremlin office and that Lebed and Korzhakov were in fact ideologically and personally quite close. Moreover, the one-time liberal deputy prime minister, Anatoly Chubais, who had initiated the move against the trio, was himself cut off from contact with Yeltsin although this proved to be only temporary.

Adding to the confusion, Lebed began to make a series of antiforeign, anti-Mormon, and anti-Semitic statements, while at the same time calling for increased state control over the country's raw materials. He combined all this with a call for restrictions on foreign businesses. The Yeltsin camp began to fear that in attempting to win over Zyuganov's supporters, their candidate may have linked himself to someone who posed as much of a threat to Yeltsin's political and economic reforms as Zyuganov himself.

Despite, or maybe because of, the narrowing of positions between Yeltsin and Zyuganov, Russian voters decided to elect Yeltsin. While the gap between Yeltsin and Zyuganov was larger than in the first round (Yeltsin received 53.8 percent of the vote versus Zyuganov's 40.3 percent), Zyuganov managed to attract more than 30 million votes, over 6 million more than he had a month earlier.

Observers said that except for the inability of the Communists to obtain access to the media, the election was reasonably fair. Especially important was the absence of violence, in spite of the deep passions that surrounded the election. Certainly Yeltsin faces enormous economic and political problems in the next few months, and if he fails to solve them, the Communists will remain a political force. But the fact that the election was such a success is an important milestone and a step toward the political stability that Russia has lacked since it abandoned Communism.

Yet as important as the election was in moving Russia along the road to democratic and market reforms, in some ways it actually complicated the process of economic recovery. In his effort to win over disgruntled voters, Yeltsin sought to buy voter support with promises of higher pensions and aid for those whose savings have disappeared because of inflation. He also made commitments to fund costly public projects. While no one, including Yeltsin, knows exactly how much his promises will cost, there is no doubt they will increase an already large budget deficit. As it is, Russia's consolidated budget deficit (federal and regional) in May 1996 totaled 11.8 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP)—the total value of all goods and services produced within a country. By comparison, the United States federal budget deficit is less than 2 percent of its GDP. The deficit is largely a result of the fact that individuals and businesses in Russia simply refuse to pay their taxes. Tax revenue in Russia has fallen to under 6 percent of GDP, whereas in normal market economies it is at least 20 to 30 percent of GDP. Unless Yeltsin can cut expenditures and increase tax collections, he is likely to spark another bout of inflation.

But it is not only taxes that are going unpaid. Both the government and private business are usually two to three months in arrears in paying wages and their debts to each other. In other countries, those who fail to pay their bills, including governments, would be declared bankrupt. Despite the enormity of the unpaid bills, Russia has so far had very few bankruptcies.

A growing budget deficit and overdue bills are just some of the economic problems Yeltsin faces. Among other challenges, he will have to deal with a continuing decline in industrial and agricultural production and a disproportionate amount of crime and corruption, all of which distort economic activity. Because of this economic uncertainty, many Russians with money send it out of the country. This currency drain, in turn, has led to a steady decline in domestic investment.

It will not be easy for Yeltsin or his prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, to come up with solutions to Russia's economic woes. It will help if Lebed can intimidate some of the criminals and corrupt officials. That, along with the Yeltsin election victory, should entice an increased flow of foreign investment, which should reduce the unemployment problem, if only slightly.

Internally, Yeltsin will have to insist that the oil and gas industries pay their fair share of taxes. This will not be easy, since the oil and gas sector of the economy has been sheltered by Chernomyrdin, who, before he became prime minister, was the president of Gazprom, the world's largest producer and distributor of natural gas. Getting the oil and gas industries to pay up would help not only to balance the budget, but also to reduce the cynicism that surrounds Chernomyrdin's management of the government.

Increased efforts must also be made to stimulate the creation of new farms and businesses. Because of increased regulation, corruption, and crime, it is harder today in Russia to open a new business or farm than it was just a few years ago. Yet it is from such start-up enterprises—even more than from privatized businesses—that Russia's economic recovery must come. To help stimulate start-ups, Russia should not only simplify the red tape needed to open a new business, it should also set up small loan funds and encourage private and foreign government lenders to do the same.

None of these economic changes will be easy. The tradition of evading taxes is centuries old in Russia, as is the acceptance of corrupt bureaucracy. Moreover, structural legacies left over from the Communist regime overemphasize heavy industry and the military-industrial complex. Mothballing unproductive factories, leading to increased unemployment, will prolong the adjustment process so that it will be years, if not decades, before there is anything resembling economic health in Russia.

Yet some new business is already beginning to develop, and more and more foreign firms are seeking to invest and open up production within Russia. Yeltsin's election victory reduces the economic uncertainty, and if Yeltsin can address the problem of who will succeed him, the Russian economy may be able to show positive growth. The Russian Constitution bars Yeltsin from seeking a third term and he has serious health problems that may make it impossible for him to fulfill his current term. Investment and growth will not come quickly or automatically. But, for the next four years at least, there is a greater likelihood of stability, which is essential for Russia's economic recovery.

By Marshall I. Goldman





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