Invigorated Yeltsin Hits Hustings
By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 1 1996; Page A17
A few years ago, fans of baseball and communism were treated to a rare sight: Fidel Castro doing the wave during the seventh-inning stretch in Havana. Now comes Boris Yeltsin, who for a brief but electric moment did the twist at a rock concert here the other night.
Quite a plucky little twist it was, too, complete with swaying hips, flapping elbows and upper teeth bared over lower lip. The 10,000 kids at the concert went wild.
This was not a simple case of the Russian president feeling fleetingly groovy. As his reelection campaign enters its final few weeks, Yeltsin has undertaken an intensive, eleventh-hour image make-over.
Gone is the sickly, bumbling, absent, besotted Yeltsin of 1995. Meet the hearty, energetic, spontaneous, sober Yeltsin of 1996.
The all-new Yeltsin of the campaign trail wades into crowds with a wireless microphone to banter with farmers, retirees and students. Beaming and perfectly coiffed, he confronts startled young women assigned to perform ceremonial dances at his appearances and demands, "Don't you have any questions for me?"
Here in Bashkortostan, a populous, oil-producing region in the southern Ural mountains, he drank fermented mare's milk and was presented with an enormous bear's hide. And at an opera staged for his benefit, he watched regally as the Bashkir potentate pays homage to the Russian czar. In many respects, it is a Western-style campaign, complete with daily photo ops, sound bites and nervous advance men.
Yeltsin has scheduled nearly 10,000 miles of travel in the closing two weeks of his campaign. Although he appears to be holding up well so far, it is a grueling schedule for a man who returned to work only five months ago following two serious bouts of heart trouble. Yeltsin, 65, has already exceeded the average life expectancy of a Russian male by eight years. Yet by playing to his strength as a campaigner with spark and charisma, the president has drawn a sharp contrast with his chief rival, the stiff, affectless Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov.
"It's hard for me to compare because I didn't really live under the Communists," said Guzel Gatiyatulina, 19, a student at the concert. "But to me Yeltsin is just a more attractive candidate."
A decade ago Yeltsin made his name as the subway-riding, flesh-pressing chief of the Communist Party organization in Moscow. Muscovites, amazed, had never seen anything quite like it from the ancient, remote men of the Soviet Politburo. But as president, that image faded as Yeltsin became an increasingly aloof figure, shielded behind the Kremlin walls and surrounded by a shadowy circle of advisers.
Now, with just over two weeks to go before the first round of presidential elections June 16, Yeltsin is pulling out all the stops to show the Russian public he is the same energetic, healthy and engaged man they first met in the mid-1980s.
So far, his success appears limited. For some Russians, especially elderly ones, anything Yeltsin does at this point is too little, too late. They are the ones who have suffered the most from high prices, delays in wage and pension payments and the sudden uncertainty of life. And they are furious about the collapse of Soviet pride and prestige, and the soaring crime levels that have beset every Russian city.
"Here in Bashkortostan, we have 800,000 pensioners and veterans" -- nearly a third of the electorate, said Leonid Kireev, 41, head of the chamber of commerce and chief of Yeltsin's campaign in Ufa, an oil-refining and petrochemical center and the regional capital. "The word `Communist' is sacred for them."
But for many younger voters, who are focusing on politics for the first time, Yeltsin's image is more malleable. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that the Russian leader's barnstorming, high-impact campaign is making a dent with them.
Thanks to the staggering advantages of incumbency, his campaign is also much more visible than that of Zyuganov and the other candidates for president. When Zyuganov came to town three weeks ago, many people were only vaguely aware he was here. There was a speech in the central auditorium, an appearance on local television and a few other events, but generally the impact was muted in this city of 1 million people.
Not so with Yeltsin. The president's posters are everywhere here. (They feature Yeltsin, dressed in a dark suit, leaning with his back against a tree and the slogan "Vote with your heart.") The concert at which he appeared was free and featured some of the premier names in Russian pop music. Young people who attended said it was easily the biggest and best concert they could remember in the city. And it was so heavily advertised in the days before Yeltsin's arrival that even the phone company got in on the act.
People dialing directory assistance in Ufa reached an operator who informed them of the time and date of the concert, pointed out that it was free and mentioned that Yeltsin would be there. Then she asked if they needed a phone number.
"It's a helluva promotion," said Bulat Karimov, 21, a senior at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut who has just returned home to Ufa for summer vacation. "Young people are pretty much for Yeltsin. . . . He's the only figure who can guarantee what's associated with democracy in this country."
Kireev, Yeltsin's local campaign chief, shrugged when asked whether the president's campaign enjoyed any unfair advantages. "If the telephone company has joined our movement, then they start cooperating with us -- provide us with some services, do us some favors."
Besides, he said, Yeltsin "is coming here not only as a candidate but also as a functioning president."
In the event, Yeltsin showed up at the concert several hours after it started and waved down at the cheering crowd from the grandstand. "Make the right choice," he said in a short address. "Vote or you're out of luck."
After Yeltsin danced, waved and left, his message was reinforced by Andrei Makarevich, lead singer of the hugely popular rock group Time Machine. Like many rock groups, Time Machine was hassled and repressed by the Communist government of Leonid Brezhnev in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and its songs were rarely played on the radio.
"I was under a Communist regime once, and I don't want a replay of it," he said. "Come cast your vote on June 16 so Time Machine can keep on playing!"
Then he led the band into its final number, "Horse Races," which includes the line, "Everyone could be a champion if they'd only choose the right horse."
Yeltsin's hands-on campaign style seemed to go over well with the crowds that gathered on the streets of Ufa and waited for three hours or more for him to show up. But it also has its limits.
Communists and their allies won about half the popular vote in Bashkortostan's parliamentary elections last December. Although Yeltsin was not a candidate himself, the lone party supporting him got just 16 percent of the vote.
Yeltsin's "is the kind of active campaigning that makes people think there's a government that cares about them," said Scott Bruckner, head of the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "But people are not fools. Nobody has been duped into believing this is a terrific administration. They see who [Yeltsin] is, and many people still don't like his image."
