RUSSIA : Daughter’s Deft Touch Puts Life in Yeltsin’s Run

The president of Russia was speaking to villagers by the White Sea when a wet gust of Arctic wind ripped through his famous pompadour, leaving it a flattened tangle. It was a minor but awkward setback in a reelection campaign that runs heavy on image. Without his snowy dome in proper contour, Boris N. Yeltsin looks, well . . . less than presidential.

Until a few weeks ago, there was no one at his side who could have rescued Yeltsin from a bad hair day without looking just as ridiculous. His entourage was all men, and in Russia, real men don’t groom each other in public.

Then along came Tatyana Dyachenko, Yeltsin’s younger daughter. She cut through the crowd like an icebreaker and fixed his hairdo with the deft touch of her fingers.

According to insiders, she has fixed a lot of other things for her father’s come-from-behind bid for reelection. Dyachenko, 36, is, by her own description, a traveling trouble-shooter on the campaign trail with tasks ranging from signature collecting to image making. At one stop, for example, she ordered Yeltsin’s bodyguards to shed their sunglasses to look less thuggish.

“I’m kind of involved in everything,” she told a Russian interviewer. “I’m everywhere--everywhere there’s a weak link.”

She has been credited with loosening up her father’s style on the stump, finding him better speech writers, keeping him sober, and when push came to shove last week, siding with Kremlin reformers to persuade him to dump three powerful hard-liners from the Cabinet.

Russia’s election year has thrust politicians’ families reluctantly into the spotlight. Yeltsin and many of his first-round challengers put their wives, children and grandchildren on television, hoping that glimpses of their private lives would score points with tantalized voters.

Even Communist Party leader Gennady A. Zyuganov, who refrains from showing off his family, has used paid television time to talk in reverent tones about his late father and 80-year-old mother, rural teachers who raised him to be one too.

But behind the scenes, only Yeltsin drew a family member out of the home and into the inner circle of a campaign team. If he defeats Zyuganov in the runoff Wednesday, the decision will count as one that helped save his presidency.

“Naina Yeltsin, the president’s wife, plays a decorative role in the campaign--a very positive decorative role,” said Andrei Piontkowski, a Moscow political analyst and close observer of the campaign. “But Tatyana’s role is more essential. She is the only one who can give her father unpleasant advice.”

A woman who grew up hiding her famous family connection to avoid favoritism, Dyachenko is more reserved than her older sister, Yelena, but has inherited more of her father’s resoluteness.

Yeltsin invited Dyachenko onto the team in late February, according to people close to the family, after she told him bluntly that the campaign led by First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg N. Soskovets was “going nowhere.”

Soskovets, 47, was soon taken off the campaign and Dyachenko began recruiting people closer to her age to gear it toward younger voters. She is now one of seven aides who meet daily to plot Yeltsin’s strategy, which includes dancing on stage at rock concerts to show his newfound vigor.

“This is not very natural for Yeltsin,” Piontkowski said. “It’s difficult to imagine that any other person but Tatyana could have persuaded him to behave in such a way.”

Taking a campaign leave from her duties as a wife and mother of two sons--Boris, 15, and Gleb, 9 months--Dyachenko supervised the collection of 1 million signatures to qualify Yeltsin as a candidate and the advance planning for his road trips.

After learning that some of her plans were not being executed, she began traveling with her father and overseeing everything. She is teaching him to be more photogenic, she said, “so people can know Daddy not as a statesman but a man.”

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