Yeltsin Foe Fires Salvoes From Burning Deck
By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 20 1996; Page A22
MOSCOW, June 19 -- Russian Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov scrambled to revive his stumbling presidential campaign today with snide attacks on President Boris Yeltsin and calls for a coalition government drawn from all major political forces that would save the country from "total collapse."
But even as Zyuganov insisted he can still win the runoff election, his campaign suffered fresh setbacks that could make it more difficult for him to overtake Yeltsin, who edged him out in the first round Sunday. Today, the fourth- and fifth-place finishers in Sunday's ballot, reformer Grigory Yavlinsky and ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, declared their opposition to the Communists, and the candidate who finished sixth, eye surgeon Svyatoslav Fyodorov, endorsed Yeltsin outright.
A top Communist Party official said Zyuganov would attempt a sweet-and-sour strategy -- portraying himself as a family man and further distancing himself from Communist orthodoxy in television ads while unleashing a barrage of nationalist rhetoric against Yeltsin on the stump. But with the runoff scheduled for early July, gloomy Communist strategists acknowledged their campaign had misfired and conceded that Zyuganov's odds of beating Yeltsin are lengthening fast.
That assessment came on the heels of the news Tuesday that retired Lt. Gen. Alexander Lebed, the strong third-place finisher Sunday, had joined Yeltsin's government as national security czar and secretary of the president's powerful Security Council. The blunt, gravel-voiced Lebed, who slammed the Communists as yesterday's men, will have broad but still undefined powers over military reform and law and order.
At a news conference today, Zyuganov was careful not to say anything even remotely critical about the popular Lebed, who got 14.7 percent of Sunday's vote, and he went out of his way to echo Lebed's own campaign themes of law, order and patriotism. In doing so, he rejected the notion that Lebed's voters would automatically cast their ballots for Yeltsin in Round 2 and predicted that up to two-thirds of them would vote Communist.
"You do not transfer the electorate as if they were serfs," Zyuganov said. "We have opposed corruption and crime, and we still do. We have favored national interests, and we still do. We have advocated normal working conditions for everyone, and we still do. And our message will not be lost on the electorate."
At the same time, on three occasions in the 20-minute news conference Zyuganov called for the formation of a coalition government, presumably to include the Communists and said he had discussed the matter with Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. "We did not speak about a Communist government," he said. "We spoke about a government of people's trust, about a coalition."
But there was no sign the government is seriously considering an alliance with the Communists, and, given Yeltsin's personal history of enmity toward them, such a scenario is all but unthinkable.
Perhaps mindful of that, Zyuganov did not stint in attacking Yeltsin today, and his barbs contained a new level of sarcasm that surpassed his usual stump rhetoric.
In an apparent reference to reports that Yeltsin goes to astrologers for advice, Zyuganov gave this explanation for why the Russian leader is trying to set the date of the runoff for July 3:
"Soothsayers, it is said, have predicted that this is the age of Aquarius and the tide will begin. He is afraid of an outgoing tide of the electorate and is waiting for an incoming tide of planetary waves."
Despite Zyuganov's never-say-die tactics, some leading Communists took a grimmer view. Alexander Shabanov, the third-ranking party official and a key Zyuganov strategist, mused openly about the possibility of Zyuganov's losing the runoff. In an interview, he said that in defeat the Communists would play a role akin to Britain's current Labor Party -- formally in opposition but in fact seen as a locus of power as a sitting government's position erodes.
Shabanov blamed Zyuganov's sagging fortunes on what he called Yeltsin's monopolization of the media, especially television. He said Yeltsin had narrowly edged Zyuganov Sunday by using a Big Lie strategy that played on fear and portrayed the Communists unfairly.
"Under the conditions, we did all we could do," Shabanov said. "I'd like to see the Western party that under such conditions of information terror could have received even half the number of votes that we did."
A date for the runoff has not been set. By law, open campaigning for the second round can begin only after the Central Election Commission makes public the final, official first-round results, probably on Thursday.
But in fact Yeltsin and Zyuganov already have begun campaigning. Shabanov said the Communists are planning to broadcast television ads that stress the theme that Zyuganov is "the most human of all men." They would include footage of his mother, a retired schoolteacher, and his wife, who works in a factory that makes watches.
That would signal a departure for the stolid Zyuganov, who, like Soviet Communist Party chieftains of old, has kept his family almost entirely out of public view. It would also steal a page from Yeltsin's campaign strategy, which made liberal use of the president's wife, Naina, and included shots of his smiling family.
Shabanov said the TV spots are aimed at portraying the frequently strident Communist candidate in a softer light. He said the ads had been aired on some local television stations during the first-round campaign but not on national TV.
Zyuganov "didn't want his family to be shown off during the campaign," Shabanov said. "It was so unpleasant that Yeltsin involved his whole family. . . . Zyuganov has very tender feelings toward his family."
Still, no amount of advertising will wash away some of the Communists' more basic problems, including such hard-line coalition partners as Viktor Anpilov, an unrepentant Stalinist with a history of inciting street violence.
One senior party official, Aman Tuleev, the governor of Siberia's Kemerovo region, acknowledged as much in an interview today. "We made only one mistake: too broad a coalition," he said. "We have totally different positions from everything [Anpilov] talks about, but still all his words ricochet back on us. . . . During the second round we'll have to set strict limits."
Tuleev, Shabanov and other Communist officials believe that Lebed's surprisingly strong showing Sunday owed much to voters who deserted Zyuganov in the closing days of the campaign. They say Lebed surged largely because of a sudden flurry of free television time and other media exposure, widely thought to have been orchestrated by Yeltsin's camp.
If the Communists have any hope, it is that Lebed's voters were more anti-Yeltsin than pro-Lebed and that they will see him as tainted now by his new alliance with the Russian leader. If that is the case, the Communists say, those voters could return to Zyuganov.
"Yeltsin has too low an opinion of our people," said Tuleev. "Our people are not a sack of potatoes that you can move where you like. In reality, Lebed will be able to contribute only 6 to 7 percent [to Yeltsin]. They can only win with fraud and lies. This is their strength."
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