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A Turning Point? : Today’s Russian presidential election is about more than personalities--it’s also about personal security : Yeltsin’s Confidence May Rest on Sand

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Steven Merritt Miner, a professor of Russian history at Ohio University, is a contributor to "The Diplomats" (Princeton University). He is working on a book, "Selling Stalin," about Soviet propaganda

As with so much in Russian politics and history, today’s presidential election is an enigma. Although Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin has claimed he will win more than half the vote, thereby avoiding the need for a second-round runoff, this may be more in the nature of bluster than accurate forecasting.

Russian opinion polls suggest that Yeltsin leads his closest rival, Communist Gennady A. Zyuganov, by seven to 20 percentage points, depending on which polling group one believes; but opinion surveys also indicate that, with several other candidates helping to split the vote, neither man enjoys an outright majority. Furthermore, one should be cautious in accepting Russian polls at face value.

Even in the United States, surely the most exhaustively polled population in the world, the science of opinion research is less than perfect. One needs only recall the magnitude of the 1994 electoral shift, which caught so many pollsters by surprise. Specific Russian circumstances, however, are enough to raise doubts about the veracity of public-opinion surveys in that country.

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Many Russians still do not have private phones, so much polling is done door-to-door. Given Russian political history, this is scarcely a foolproof method. Authoritarian traditions run deep in Russia, and it has not been a long time since speaking openly about politics could land the average Russian in hot water. Although many are far more inclined to speak their minds than they were even five years ago, old habits of reticence die hard. Most pollsters are young and relatively privileged urbanites; naturally, many of them are either Yeltsin supporters or at least anti-Communists. It requires little imagination to understand that a cautious respondent, answering the door to a total stranger, might well express support for a sitting president, regardless of privately held views.

One crucial segment of the population that might have a decisive impact on the election, but which does not poll easily, is the rural vote. Russia is still a heavily rural nation, with some 30% of the population engaged in agriculture, as opposed to a figure of between 2% and 5% in developed nations. All indications are that Zyuganov enjoys a 2-1 lead over Yeltsin among rural voters. The electoral gap may well be even larger, given the unreliability of polls.

At first sight, this seems odd in light of recent history. In the 1930s, the Communists under Stalin carried out what amounted to a war against the peasantry, seizing private land and herding peasants into dreary, unproductive collective farms. At the time, some 10 million peasants perished in a famine engineered by the Communists for the purpose of breaking the peasants’ will to resist. Throughout the remaining decades of Soviet rule, life on the collectives remained grim; villages lacked such basic services as telephones and running water, and the vast majority of rural settlements remained unconnected to the outside world by paved roads. Until the 1970s, the state restricted peasants’ rights, subjecting them to different laws and restricting their movement to the cities. Once internal migration became easier, young people fled the farms for the relative abundance and opportunity of the cities.

That Yeltsin has been unable to retain the loyalty of farmers in light of this sad history must be seen as one of his greatest failures. Yet, the reasons are clear.

Yeltsin’s power base has always been in the major urban centers. There, economic opportunities have increased, especially for the young and ambitious. The rural population, by contrast, is older, less educated and much less concerned about such things as intellectual freedom and the right to travel. Even worse, economic opportunities have actually constricted, as farm production has dropped by one-third since 1991.

Concerned with political struggles in the cities, Yeltsin and his men did not squarely attack rural problems until relatively late. They delayed passing legislation allowing private ownership of land; they did not try to create means for ambitious farmers to circumvent old-style regional bosses eager to thwart the growth of a private farm sector. Even more important, they did not follow the example of the last great rural reformer of czarist times, Pyotr A. Stolypin, and create a rural lending bank that would allow prospective private farmers to borrow capital for land, machinery and livestock purchases.

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As a result, young people have continued to leave farms for the cities, and the remaining population is sullenly resentful of what they rightly see as Yeltsin’s neglect of the countryside. Farmers might not want to see the return of the Communists, who so badly mistreated them, but they have little love for the current government, and the only realistic alternative is Zyuganov.

Zyuganov has skillfully played on resentments, changing his arguments, chameleon-like, to suit his audience. To elderly communists, he recalls the glories of the victory over Nazism, of the Soviet Unions’s position as a superpower, now supposedly lost owing to Yeltsin’s “betrayal.” He even has kind words for Josef Stalin, once claiming that the generalissimo had simply not had enough time in power, despite the fact that he ruled the Soviet Union for almost 30 years. When speaking to farmers, Zyuganov does not, of course, mention Stalin’s collectivization of the farms; instead, he stresses the predictability and stability of the late Soviet period, cheap food and regular wages. He also blames Russia’s economic problems on the loss of the non-Russian republics of the old U.S.S.R. To Westerners, Zyuganov eliminates talk of American-led conspiracies to weaken Russia--a staple of his addresses to Russian audiences--and instead assures investors and foreign governments that he is a European-style social democrat who will not attack private property.

In Russia’s fragmented society, these tactics have worked--up to a point. As the election approached, Russians wanted to hear less about what Zyuganov opposes and more about what he would do in power. Although Yeltsin may be objectionable, the old Soviet order was nothing to cheer about.

Concerns about Zyuganov’s intentions have been magnified by the media, which are overwhelmingly pro-Yeltsin. During the previous six years, television and radio have been systematically placed in the hands of Yeltsin supporters, and they portray Zyuganov and other challengers in an unremittingly negative light. The newspapers are much freer and more mixed; some, such as Zavtra and Pravda, support radical nationalists and Communists, respectively. Most editors, however, have understood that they can only lose from a return to the days of communist press controls. Consequently, in the early months of the year, Russian press insiders have claimed, members of the liberal press decided Yeltsin was the only candidate who stood a chance of stopping a communist restoration. Thus, they stilled their doubts about Yeltsin--concerning his increasing authoritarianism, his drinking, the war in Chechnya, the rising crime rate, and so forth--and decided to back him as the lesser of two evils.

As is true in most countries, with the election nearing, the apocalyptic rhetoric increased proportionately. In Russia, however, the invective is especially worrisome. Never before in Russian history has a peaceful transition of power taken place, and Russians have never been able to vote a second time for a chief executive. The Communists are already preparing to claim fraud if Yeltsin wins; they have a great many friends in the military who detest Yeltsin as the betrayer of the U.S.S.R., and they may be prepared to act on their hatreds. At the same time, Yeltsin is busily recalling past communist atrocities, and his men are saying openly that a restoration of communist rule will lead to bloodshed, repression and perhaps civil war.

The Russian Constitution, rewritten by Yeltsin after his violent victory over the Soviet-era Parliament in October 1993, invests the president with near-dictatorial authority, albeit subject to elections at six-year intervals. The winner of today’s vote will thus wield enormous power, and the possibility is strong that the winner will use this power to settle old scores. Given the combustible material laying about among the wreckage of the post-Soviet empire, the fires of political hatred could become a general conflagration.*

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