Californians Pitched Political Message in Ukraine : Elections: Sacramento consultants were tapped by independence leaders to produce TV commercials for campaign that ended in landslide victory.

All their careers, California political consultants Sal Russo and Tony Marsh have worked for candidates who have extolled freedom and warned voters not to trust the Soviet empire. But it was like a bolt out of the blue when they recently were invited to the Ukraine to help pitch a similar message.

Now, they are celebrating one of their strangest and most satisfying election victories ever--the landslide vote in the Ukraine to declare independence from Moscow and the Soviet Union.

Russo and Marsh, based in Sacramento, were tapped by leaders of the Ukrainian independence movement to develop the TV commercials for their campaign. “We were struck by the similarities of the process. You communicate with the voters and address the same concerns: economic well-being, their children’s future, fear of war,” Russo said.

But producing campaign commercials in the Ukraine is a lot different than in California. The two partners took basic political skills honed in America to an embryonic democracy where local TV officials--their careers nurtured in communism--had a difficult time comprehending what they were all about.

They returned with tales of intrigue, double-dealing and talkative citizens unabashedly exhibiting a long-suppressed spirit of nationalism.

For Russo and Marsh, veteran Republican strategists who have helped elect candidates for local office on up to the Oval Office, this was a short campaign by California standards. They were just finishing an apple grower’s successful bid for a seat on an obscure irrigation board in the Sierra foothills when a telephone call came from Moscow asking them to tackle an election of worldwide historic importance that would be held in only four weeks.

The caller was a fellow GOP operative, Marc Nuttle, with whom they had worked on President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign. Nuttle had gone to the Ukraine at the request of the Endowment for Democracy, a bipartisan organization created by Congress to promote democracy around the world. The Ukraine independence movement had contacted the organization seeking American political ingenuity. Nuttle, after a quick scouting trip, had concluded the campaign needed TV ads.

“The call came out of the blue,” recalled Russo. “My initial reaction, after we picked ourselves off the floor, was we’ve got a thousand things to do here. We don’t want to do that. But it’s awfully compelling when somebody asks, ‘Will you help 52 million people throw off the yoke of an empire to be a free people?’ I mean, it’s not often you can be part of the birth of a new nation.”

Russo and Marsh had helped elect Violeta Barrios de Chamorro president of Nicaragua in 1990, but that was the extent of their foreign political experience. They had never even been to the Soviet Union. But many Americans and Canadians of Ukranian heritage already were there working on the campaign--basically financing it--and they assisted the two Californians with local customs and language.

Their first obstacle was a Soviet Establishment opposed to Ukranian independence. A two-person film crew carrying camera and sound equipment was detained at a Moscow airport until a high local police official who secretly supported the independence movement intervened and allowed the Sacramento-based crew to continue on to the Ukranian capital of Kiev.

But, as it turned out, the American TV equipment would not work with Soviet television. Needing both equipment and air time, Marsh and Nuttle held a three-hour negotiating session in Kiev with hard-line government officials who controlled the Ukraine’s only television station.

“During the first hour, everything we asked for was ‘impossible,’ ” Marsh said. “In the second hour, it was ‘maybe.’ In the third, they literally handed us the TV station. They weren’t on our side, but they didn’t want to seem to be turning us down either. It had become obvious this thing was going to pass. These were old-line communists and you could just see them sitting there thinking, ‘Will I have to become a coal miner? Will I have to move into an apartment in the industrial section?’ They were fearful not only of losing their jobs, but maybe worse.”

The government officials assigned a woman named Tania, ostensibly to help the American politicos. But, in reality, her job was to throw roadblocks in their paths, Russo and Marsh believed. For example, they were loaned cameras only during daylight hours, given audio equipment in the evening and allowed use of an editing studio solely after midnight. “They saw to it that we never got longer than two hours to sleep,” Russo said.

Although the election was regarded as a slam-dunk for the independence movement, the goal was to amass as big a vote as possible and carry every region, including the Crimean Peninsula and six Eastern oblasts-- or provinces--where ethnic Russians were in the majority. “It was important for the Ukraine to demonstrate that it was united, regardless of whether the people were Ukranians or ethnic Russians, in order to discourage any border dispute with (the Republic of) Russia,” Russo noted.

As it turned out, every region voted for independence.

Unlike how they would have operated in America, Russo and Marsh developed their commercials without the benefit of a public opinion poll. They devised strategy the old-fashioned way--by talking to a lot of people and asking about their concerns.

Basically, the commercials targeted the ethnic Russians, old people who were afraid of losing their pensions in a new nation, collective farmers fearful of being kicked off the land under privatization and women leery of war in a forced annexation by Russia.

They did this, in part, by filming “man on the street” interviews with real people--retired military officers casting doubts about any Russian invasion of the Ukraine, mixed couples (Ukranian and ethnic Russian) talking about the real issue being self-determination, and farmers attacking the failure of communism.

They also hired actors to play Ukranian citizens carrying sacks of bread, cartons of eggs and TV sets produced in the Ukraine to far-off Moscow. The message: Ukraine First. And they pulled together opinion molders--members of the Establishment, some of them reluctantly--to argue for independence.

“One of the most difficult things was to edit (film) in Ukranian. We couldn’t pick up the nuances,” Russo said.

Once, when a “man on the street” interviewer asked a farmer how he felt about independence, the farmer replied into the camera, “For 73 years we’ve lived under communism and we have nothing . . . Independence now!” Between the two sentences, however, the farmer made a vulgar, colloquial reference to the interviewer’s mother. Only later, when Ukranians laughed at the comment, were the words understood and edited out of the film.

Marsh said the Ukranians also “cracked up” over an old Reagan commercial the Americans showed them as a sample of their past work. It was the 1984 “Bear in the Woods” commercial, with the bear representing the Soviet Union and the message being that Reagan was wise to prepare the United States for possible attack. “They got a big kick out of it,” he said.

In all, Russo and Marsh produced five Ukranian TV commercials, ranging from 90 seconds to six minutes in length. Air time was free because the commercials ran on state-owned television--for 10 minutes of a 30-minute news broadcast, three times a day for two weeks. “That would have cost well over $10 million in California,” Russo calculated.

Only as an American political consultant, he mused, “can you do a 2,000-vote irrigation district in Placer County, then turn around and do a new nation across the globe for 52 million people.”

Added the consultant, who worked in the Ukraine only for expenses, “actually, we made more money electing the apple grower to the irrigation board.”