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“Stalin had higher positives and lower negatives than Yeltsin….”
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“….Secondly, in terms of finances, they might as well have had unlimited refills. Forget fundraising dinners and appealing to donors, never mind Russia’s electoral law that supposedly capped campaign spending at $3 million for each presidential candidate (as an interesting aside, the communists did, in fact, abide by this rule, although that likely had more to do with their empty coffers as opposed to, say, actually feeling morally obligated to adhere to said provision than anything else), for as was the case with a great deal of the members within the fourth estate, the fear of a communist victory was such that the Oligarchs, as to who, at the bare minimum, likely stood to face both jail time and the loss of their considerable wealth in the wake of a triumph by Zyuganov #DroppingRhymes, did everything in their power so as to ensure a Yeltsin victory, putting up somewhere between $700 million and $2 billion, according to estimates, to finance the campaign. Yeah…
Finally, Gorton, Dresner, Shumate, and, obviously, Yeltsin, by extension, greatly benefited from the contributions that were made by many of the latter’s minions, as to who pulled out all the stops — legal or otherwise — in order to deliver a w for the president. Among the favorite tactics employed by these goons included “[the] cancellation of hotel reservations made by the Zyuganov campaign, issuing false invitations to Zyuganov press conferences with the wrong times, and the publication and distribution of fake extremist Communist programs.” Even better, “The Communist candidate’s speeches and position papers were blacked out in the major media, and voters could learn about Zyuganov’s program only if they happened upon a rally or leaflet.” Noice.
At the same time, however, all of the dirrty money and political black ops in the world could do nothing to remove Yeltsin from his precarious political predicament, for as the team soon discovered upon conducting their own analysis primarily by, you know, asking questions of actual substance, it wasn’t just that the majority of the Russian people didn’t like the guy #DoubleNegative — it was that they justifiably saw him as “a friend who had betrayed them, a populist who had become imperial[,]” to further borrow from Kramer’s article, and there was more bad news. According to Dresner, “Stalin had higher positives and lower negatives than Yeltsin. We actually tested the two in polls and focus groups. More than 60% of the electorate believed Yeltsin was corrupt; more than 65% believed he had wrecked the economy. We were in a deep, deep hole.”
Still, it didn’t exactly take an experienced pollster to recognize that the issue that had the entire country — mobsters and oligarchs, etc., notwithstanding, of course — understandably seething was of the economic variety (even those same Russian newspapers with the empty statistical findings were on top of the matter). More specifically, Russkies were all up in arms over the dire financial straits #MoneyForNothing that had beset government workers as to who hadn’t seen a paycheck in MONTHS despite Yeltsin promising to remedy the situation in a development that might as well have induced a Dresner facepalm but nevertheless provided the team with a teachable, if not also as to what one would think should have made for a classic “Captain Obvious”, moment. As Dresner explained to Dyachenko, “You can’t just promise these things. You have to do them. And then you have to make sure the people know what you’ve done.”
In order to accomplish this relative to the criminal economic deprivation that was facing the aforementioned members of the proletariat (sorry, it’s just too easy), the triad advised Yeltsin to, in the political equivalent of flogging someone in a public square/Village Green, chastise those officials as to who had failed to apportion the money that had been earmarked for said salary arrears as per his instructions — a proposal that both Yeltsin and the press were all too happy to implement and cover, respectively.
Yet even so, while such a feel-good PR exercise might have looked great for the cameras and bought the president some desperately needed political capital, without the money that was needed to actually alleviate said financial suffering the entire undertaking would have been seen as yet another empty gesture, and it was at this pivotal point wherein the Clinton connection paid crucial dividends (no pun intended), although you wouldn’t know it from reading Time’s featured report, which is rather curious given that the whole lipstick on a pig scenario was certainly not lost on other reputable news outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, never mind esteemed Kremlinologist Lilia Shevtsova.
Strong-armed by the administration, and in a move that was aptly characterized by Michael Dobbs in The WaPo as “an expression of political support by Western governments for Russian leader Boris Yeltsin in advance of presidential elections in June[,]” the normally, or at least outwardly, politically neutral International Monetary Fund became, with a single transaction, Boris’ single largest donor by approving a loan for $10.2 billion (the second largest loan of its kind in IMF history to that point, by the way, that was only superseded by the one that was given to Mexico in 1995 for $17.8 billion), with a crucial installment of more than $4 billion being made available during that first year, thereby enabling Yeltsin to repay $2.8 billion in back wages as well as giving him the ability to follow through on his promise to increase spending on social programs. Sidebar — there were social programs in Russia during the ‘90s?
Even at the time, the sentiment that was expressed by many Russian political experts and as to which has subsequently been substantiated by history was that without the sudden infusion of Das Kapital #SorryNotSorry, Yeltsin almost assuredly would have lost — possibly in the first round — and the West went still further to influence the outcome of the election. While privately the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Thomas Pickering, unsuccessfully attempted to persuade Grigory Yavlinsky, a democratic candidate as to who presented a considerable threat to Yeltsin, to back out of the first round so as to increase the odds of success for Boris Nikolayevich, the then-managing director of the IMF, Michel Camdessus, went out of his way to state that not only was the aforesaid loan hardly a blank check, but also, and more importantly, that should “a new Government” come to power that would fail to adhere to “the commitments of Russia established in these documents,” that their “support would be interrupted[,]” thereby essentially blackmailing the Russian populace into voting for Yeltsin, and the results spoke for themselves in the opinion polls that were conducted by ROMIR (Russian Opinion and Market Research) in which the amount of support for the president more than doubled from a paltry 8% on February 18 to 17% on March 17, and suddenly the campaign had traction.
From there, and in order to capitalize on their newfound momentum, the team knew that it needed to …see link
Link:https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/from-russia-with-revenge-536b25921ca6
