Russia’s last free election was eleven years ago, but it is still relevant today. The degree to which Russian journalists did everything in their power to re-elect Boris Yeltsin—including cooperating with his campaign team, spreading rumors about the Communist party and making sure Yeltsin appears regularly on television in a positive light—was hardly mentioned, if at all, in all the recent obituaries and editorials about him.
Yet the 1996 election was a turning point, and it placed the media into an uncomfortable position: help an unpopular president get re-elected or go back to communism. Many journalists did what they thought was the right thing to do. As the press raised Yeltsin’s popularity from below five percent to above 50, Vladimir Putin, then largely unknown, took notice. The lesson was clear: get the press on your side and people will believe what they’re told. Of course, this is not a new lesson, but the specifics were different, especially when it came to television.
“Yeltsin made news that we helped him create,” said Igor Malashenko, who at the time was president of NTV, one of the top three Russian television networks. Malashenko said he regularly met with Yeltsin’s campaign team, including his speechwriters, and even discussed the kinds of sound bites he thought would be best. The networks wanted to get Yeltsin out to the country, even to the Far East, and for people to see him holding babies, shaking hands and even dancing. They also wanted to see him giving many speeches. But Yeltsin was not a great orator, so Malashenko bought him a teleprompter from the States. “In Russia, there were no teleprompters,” Malashenko admitted.
The media helped Yeltsin on many levels, and it was a serious effort—Russians can be nauseatingly nostalgic. The Ne Day Bog (God Forbid) newspaper was exclusively set up to re-elect Yeltsin. In fact, most papers—with the exception of communist publications like Sovetskaya Rossiya (Soviet Russia) and Zavtra (Tomorrow)—gave Yeltsin positive coverage. (Some of the journalists hired to write those positive pieces were known as “gold pens.”) In addition, rumors of communist training camps where young men were taught armed combat were widely discussed on television and in print. And some news, like Yeltsin’s major heart attack before the final round of voting, was simply withheld.
Paradoxically, the same television stations that actively supported Yeltsin did not hold back from continuing to show the horrors of the Chechnya War. This made the war extremely unpopular, but Yeltsin did not try to restrict the coverage. He accepted the consequences of free speech. And when oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky—who didn’t want to see their wealth taken away by an unpredictable communist government—threw their support and money behind Yeltsin, he accepted that too.
Whereas the oligarchs had one motive, the journalists who worked for them had several. Some simply followed orders (Berezovsky owned Channel 1 and Gusinsky owned NTV); some did it for the money; some for ideological reasons and some for a combination of the three.
The lesson from all this was twofold: 1) television in Russia is the most influential mass communication tool; 2) the political persuasions of a handful of oligarchs can influence the entire nation.
Putin learned both lessons well. Now there are no independent owners of mass media because Putin presented them with a simple choice: stay out of politics or lose your wealth. Now the government controls all national television stations. The reality of the Chechnya war is not on television. Journalists like the recently murdered Anna Politkovskaya—whose thorough knowledge of the war matched her fierce criticism of it—are banned from television. Last year, during Russia’s financial dispute with Gazprom, the state-owned natural gas giant that now owns NTV, the TV networks did not give Ukraine’s perspective. After the former KGB agent Alexander Litvenenko was poisoned in London, the main television networks in Russia focused on the “panic” in London as opposed to who may have killed him and why.
Although there are countless such examples, some dispute the argument that the 1996 presidential election was a major influence on Putin’s current policies. Nikolay Petrov, of The Carnegie Moscow Center, says Putin learned much more from the 1996 mayoral election in St. Petersburg than from the national election. A mentor of Putin’s lost the mayoral election because he focused on ideology and not on what the people cared about most: high wages and full supermarkets. In addition, Malashenko says that Putin’s hold on free speech is like that of the old Soviet Union—i.e. state control. In a general sense, Malashenko and Petrov are right. Putin does emphasize economic wellbeing (as opposed to ideals like free speech), and the state-controlled networks support him. Yet this is only part of the picture.
What makes the 1996 presidential election a relevant precedent is that Putin, along with the rest of the country, got a real taste of how influential an independent press can be. Soviet leaders never had such a tangible reference point. They didn’t have to deal with independent oligarchs who could influence an election with their own media outlets. So Putin did his best to get rid of such oligarchs, such elections and such speech. Sounds like a lesson well learned.
