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Thread: “Yanks to the rescue”: Time’s story of how Americans helped Yeltsin win 1996 pres election

  1. #1

    “Yanks to the rescue”: Time’s story of how Americans helped Yeltsin win 1996 pres election

    “Yanks to the rescue”: Time’s not-so secret story of how Americans helped Yeltsin win 1996 presidential election
    https://off-guardian.org/2018/02/19/...tial-election/

    February 19, 2018

    Imagine Izvestia ran a headline in January 2018 titled “Rescuing Donald”, in which it proudly boasted that a group of crack Russian election-fixers had been sent over to Washington to make sure Trump beat Hillary. Does anyone imagine it would stop short of impeachment for Trump and maybe even hot war with Russia? Yet 22 years ago Time magazine ran just such a feature on how four Americans and an ex-pat Russian had managed the 1996 Russian presidential election to ensure a win for Boris Yeltsin. And apparently that was something to openly boast about.



    On July 15 1996 Time magazine ran a screaming front page that read “Yanks to the Rescue – the secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win.”

    The exclusive feature inside left little room for doubt. It was headlined in red “Rescuing Boris” and the caption on the header photo of a smiling Yeltsin was:

    The secret story of how four US advisors used polls, focus groups, negative ads and all the other techniques of American campaigning to help Boris Yeltsin win

    while the standfirst continued the exultant theme (our emphasis):

    “In the end the Russian people chose – and chose decisively – to reject the past. Voting in the final round of the presidential election last week, they preferred Boris Yeltsin to his communist rival Gennadi Zyuganov by a margin of 13 percentage points. He is far from the ideal democrat or reformer, and his lieutenants Victor Chenomyrdin and Alexander Lebed are already squabbling over power, but Yeltsin is arguably the best hope Russia has for moving toward pluralism and an open economy. By re-electing him, the Russians defied predictions that they might willingly resubmit themselves to communist rule.

    The outcome was by no means inevitable. Last winter Yeltsin’s approval ratings were in the single digits. There are many reasons for his change in fortune, but a crucial one has remained a secret. For four months, a group of American political consultants clandestinely participated in guiding Yeltsin’s campaign, here is the inside story of how these advisors helped Yeltsin achieves the victory that would keep reform in Russia alive.


    The article went on to explain that Yeltsin was deeply unpopular at that time in Russia, polling no more than 8% and widely blamed for the rise of the gangster oligarchs, the collapse of infrastructure and the looting of Russia’s once state-owned natural resources. The Communists were resurgent, taking a lot of new seats in the elections to the Duma in the winter of ’95-6. The Communist presidential candidate, Gennadi Zyuganov, was poised to ride this wave. If left to their own devices, Time says, the Russians could easily have voted a Red back into the Kremlin.

    Obviously this could not be permitted to happen.

    Time tells us America needed to keep the Communists out because of the need to maintain Russia on track with “reform.” But from our vantage point we now know that “reform” didn’t mean political reform. In fact the US was more than happy to ignore Yeltsin’s numerous unconstitutional incursions for as long as he was doing their bidding.

    What Time means by “reform” is the vastly illegal and ethically barbarous looting of the Russian state and its people that was then being systematically perpetrated by the US, its financial institutions and its own gangster capitalists. A Communist, or even a moderate nationalist, could be a disaster for this lucrative open conduit of virtually free raw materials and knock-down block shares in oil and gas production (and that’s not even getting into the questions of PNAC and the neocon drive to see Russia perennially divided and weakened, if not actually partitioned).

    For all these reasons, broadly encompassed under the weasel word “reform”, the US did not want anyone but Yeltsin in the Kremlin in 1996. So, says Time, the Yanks decided to step in and fix things.

    They sent over a team of five election-managers and image-makers to try to turn Yeltsin’s fortunes around. The men were old hands at this business. Richard Dresner had helped Bill Clinton get elected as governor or Arkansas. George Gorton was a “longtime strategist” for California governor Pete Wilson. Joe Shumate was a “polling expert” and another of Bill Clinton’s election team. Steven More was a PR specialist. Felix Braynin was a Russian ex-patriot who didn’t trust Communists.

    They knew from the off their job wasn’t going to be easy. Because for the Russian people Boris Nikolayevich was one step up from poison. 60% of the population thought Yeltsin was corrupt. 65% thought he had wrecked the economy. In 1996 Stalin was getting more positive approval ratings than Yeltsin. An “early memo” from the group dated March 2 and cited by Time says:

    Voters don’t approve of the job Yeltsin is doing, don’t think things will ever get any better and prefer the Communists’ approach.

    They were similarly frank about the solution:

    There exists only one very simple strategy for winning: first, becoming the only alternative to the Communists; and the second, making the people see that the Communists must be stopped at all costs.”

    So, the five Americans got to work trying to secure the Russian election for their candidate of choice. They ran ad campaigns to promote the (bogus) idea of Yeltsin’s popularity. They ran other ads denigrating the opposition. They fixed his suits and sprayed his hair.


    Time’s graphic showing the five “yanks” who came to Boris Yeltsin’s rescue in 1996 and helped secure him the presidency of Russia


    They Americanised the process as much as they could – but not as much as they wanted to. A plan they conceived of Yeltsin entering a conference hall “through a boisterous crowd that would mob him” and delivering a short 15-minute speech “that television viewers might actually sit through” was rejected out of hand. Yeltsin decided instead to enter the hall in the normal Russian way to polite claps from men in suits, and he delivered an hour-long speech that probably made his American handlers groan in despair.

    They made sure this rebellion wouldn’t happen again by using a “perception analyser” to show Yeltsin’s handlers what a turn-off his performance had been. From then on the Yanks seem to have had things their way, or so Time implies. They proceeded to look into the Russian people’s deepest fears and see how they could be used advantageously:

    Having helped establish the campaign’s major theme, the Americans then set out to modify it. The Americans used their focus group co-ordinator, Alexei Levinson, to determine what exactly Russians most feared about the Communists. Long lines, scarce food and re-nationalisation of property were frequently cited, but mostly people worried about civil war.

    Fear was the key. And Russia in the 1990s was a fearful place. All they had to do was convince enough people the Communists were more frightening than the gangsters currently running the show.

    ‘Stick with Yeltsin and at least you’ll have calm’ – that was the line we wanted to convey

    And it worked. Or something did. Whether by dint of hairspray, focus groups, fear porn or something else undeclared, Yeltsin leapt from 2-8% popular support to 54.4% by the end of the campaign.

    And he won. And Russia was saved.

    Well, it was saved for the United States, its financial institutions and gangster capitalists anyway. But that’s another story.

    You can download the entire article as a PDF here. You need to read it all to get the full flavour. And just to show how proud America was of interfering in this election, there was even a Hollywood movie made about it in 2003 called Spinning Boris.

    [UPDATE: have now watched that film – it adds mind-blowing levels of racism and racial stereotyping to the mix to complement the laugh-along celebration of defrauding a sovereign nation and its people. Enjoy]

    After you have taken a look at all this, consider the following question:

    What’s worse?

    1) The triumphal bragging about manipulating the election to make sure their man became president in order to continue defrauding and dispossessing and even starving ordinary Russian people, or

    2) The insane hypocrisy of – 22 years later – indicting 13 Russians for doing at worst a fragment and shadow of this colossal crime?

    History will have a tough time deciding won’t it.



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  3. #2

  4. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    We believe our lying eyes...

  5. #4
    Yeltsin: [Communism] We shall not let it raise again.
    US: But we can.



  6. #5
    "Let it not be said that we did nothing." - Dr. Ron Paul. "Stand up for what you believe in, even if you are standing alone." - Sophie Magdalena Scholl
    "War is the health of the State." - Randolph Bourne "Freedom is the answer. ... Now, what's the question?" - Ernie Hancock.

  7. #6
    Dermokratiya, USA

    twenty years ago, the United States launched an … interference campaign to ensure Boris Yeltsin’s reelection. … the Americans supported Yeltsin in body and spirit … American influence in Russia was so openly acknowledged. The public record shows clear points of direct American coordination, collusion, and action in Yeltsin’s favor. …

    the United States interfered … to advance its foreign policy goals. “[W]e thought it was imperative that Yeltsin win, or that someone like Yeltsin win in June of 1996, in order to continue the reform process,” recalled Thomas Graham, the chief political analyst at the US embassy in Moscow in 1996. “This was a classic case of the ends justifying the means, and we did get the result that we wanted.” …

    American democratic mantras are often thinly disguised rhetoric that promote US power. …

    Throughout the 1990s, the IMF, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and other American and European sources poured tens of billions of dollars into Russia. USAID had funneled over $40.4 million in noncompetitive grants through Harvard University’s Institute for International Development (HIID) by June 1996 … HIID created and financed NGOs that led seminars and distributed materials on how to run Western-style campaigns and elections.

    Meanwhile, Clinton unwaveringly supported Yeltsin. The Clinton administration solidly backed Yeltsin during the constitutional crisis between him and the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1993. Clinton told Strobe Talbott that “I guess we’ve just got to pull up our socks and back Ol’ Boris again.” Clinton smoothed over Yeltsin’s tank bombardment of the Russian parliament, which resulted in 187 killed and hundreds wounded … As Thomas Pickering, then ambassador to Russia, explained, “We had no alternative.” Ironically, Yeltsin’s war against the Duma and his December 1993 referendum on a new constitution created the legal framework for the immense power Putin enjoys today.

    The Clinton administration faced another “no alternative” moment in February 1996 when Yeltsin announced he would seek reelection. His prospects looked bleak: he ranked dead last in the polls, with only single-digit appeal. … the president was determined to stand by Old Boris … “I know the Russian people have to pick a president,” Clinton told him, “and I know that means we’ve got to stop short of giving a nominating speech for the guy. But we’ve got to go all the way in helping in every other respect.

    According to a White House memo leaked to the Washington Times in March 1996, Clinton and Yeltsin had agreed to support each other in their respective reelection bids. [Can anyone say “collusion”] … The memo caused a congressional uproar. The Clinton administration confirmed its authenticity but called the leak “a violation of federal law” and opened a criminal investigation. … Clinton considered “the leak to be far more sensitive than the typical anonymous disclosure” because “the president feels like he ought to be able to sit down with the president of Russia and have a private conversation.” …

    During the first half of 1996, the White House pushed for a timely IMF loan … ignored the Russian oligarchs’ massive campaign of fraud and theft, and stayed silent on Yeltsin’s brutal war in Chechnya. Clinton also honored Yeltsin’s request to not meet privately with Zyuganov during his visit to Moscow. Pickering pressured Grigory Yavlinsky, a member of the liberal Yabloko Party, to drop out of the election’s first round to help Yeltsin’s chances. … [Clinton] “I want this guy to win so bad it hurts. I guess that shows.” …

    Most accounts of American interference in the 1996 election focus on the three American consultants — George Gorton, Joe Shumate, and Richard … The Americans were sequestered in Moscow’s Presidential Hotel … They assisted in opinion polling; suggested a “dirty tricks” campaign that would include planting “truth squads” of hecklers to disrupt Zyuganov’s rallies; made Yeltsin’s ads slicker and his messages subtler; and urged him to travel around the country, stay on message, and connect with the Russian people. … they urged his team to “go negative” …

    Established in 1983, the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and International Republican Institute (IRI) … received their funding from USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the US State Department, among other domestic foundations and foreign governments. From 1992 to 1997, USAID gave them a combined $17.4 million for “democracy assistance” programs in Russia. …

    In his memoir Behind the Oval Office, Morris notes that Dresner offered to keep him in the loop on the Russian presidential race. With Clinton’s approval, Morris received weekly opinion poll briefings that he would share with the president, who would in turn pass on recommendations to Dresner via Morris. … Clinton wanted to know how he could help Yeltsin, and Dresner dutifully called with his suggestions. … Dresner offered a list of talking points …

    In a 2003 interview, Morris confirmed the collusion between the White House and the Kremlin, emphasizing that the presidential pair “worked really closely in these elections.” …

    American intervention played a decisive role in Yeltsin’s victory, it came when Clinton helped secure a $10.2 billion IMF loan in March 1996. But the assistance didn’t stop there. Two weeks later, Germany and France loaned Yeltsin’s government $2.7 billion and $400 million, respectively. That sum conveniently covered the cost of his election-year spending promises. All the cash quickly vanished. For example, Russia’s foreign currency reserves declined from $20 billion to $12.5 billion in the first half of 1996. The Russian government spent at least $9 billion, almost equal to the IMF loan.

    According to Paul Klebnikov, “[s]ome of the money went to the Yeltsin campaign, some to well-connected businessmen and government officials, some to pay ordinary Russians their long overdue paychecks.” … One prominent scholar of Russian politics has argued that Yeltsin’s pork-barrel politics ensured his victory.

    Clinton personally endorsed the IMF loan, and Yeltsin boasted that he “had to involve Clinton, Jacques Chirac, Helmut Kohl and [John] Major” to get it. …

    Helene Hessel, then director for Eastern Europe at Standard & Poor’s, told Reuters, “[t]he West is so scared that Yeltsin will lose that they are doing a lot of things to support him. This is certainly some political kind of decision.” The French paper Le Monde called the loan “an implicit vote in favor of candidate Yeltsin,” warned that “the West is playing a dangerous game,” and said there was “neither the urgency nor the necessity for a gesture so spectacular.” In the Moscow Times, Nicholas Eberstadt, a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote, “[s]ome of the assertions on this latest round of IMF lending are so implausible and absurd that only a Western government official, or an international civil servant, could possibly believe them.”

    Even the Washington Post saw right through the chicanery, albeit approvingly, “NOW THIS is the right way to serve Western interests … It’s to use the politically bland but powerful instrument of the International Monetary Fund.

    Money — lots of it — flowed in and out of the campaign. Some of it was directly rerouted from Western sources, but the bulk came from laundering government funds through a string of Russian oligarch banks, offshore accounts, Western banks, and into the Yeltsin war chest. Large portions were skimmed off along the way.

    No one knows just how much money went into the campaign. Russian electoral law capped campaign budgets at $2.9 million, but estimates of Yeltsin’s range from $100 million to “easily over $1 billion” to upwards of $2 billion. Pinning down an actual figure is impossible because a lot of the money flowed in and out of Yeltsin’s “black treasury.”

    Boris Berezovsky concocted this ingenious system in January 1996 when he convinced Russia’s warring oligarchs — Vladimir Gusinsky, Vladimir Vinogradov, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky — to unite behind Yeltsin. … the profitable scam allowed Russia’s oligarchs to further enrich themselves. …

    $50 million was transferred from a Russian bank to the Bahamas. Then this money was transferred to another country— in Europe, for instance, or the Baltic States. From there the money was brought into Russia in cash and deposited in the black treasury. But not all the money was brought back in. Many suspected that the finance ministry redirected a lot of this money from the budget. … the presidential team largely drew their funds from the budget.

    And what about the IMF money? … a PricewaterhouseCoopers audit conducted in 1999 showed that the Russian Central Bank issued $1 billion in reserves for a finance ministry promissory note. Then $855 million was funneled through the Financial Management Co., or FIMACO, an offshore bank based in Jersey, Channel Islands. From there it was invested in Russia’s high-yield, short-term domestic bond market (GKO). In 1996, the GKO was paying out returns of over 200 percent … The IMF money pumped up the GKO to attract foreign investors, creating a lucrative bubble that Lawrence Summers, HIID directors Jonathan Hay and Andrei Shleifer, George Soros, and many others exploited. In 1998, the GKO came crashing down, the ruble collapsed, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians lost their savings. A year later, the IMF admitted it was aware of the scam … but did nothing to stop it.

    A portion of those GKO returns ended up in Yeltsin’s campaign. No one knows where the rest went … between $200 million to $300 million was embezzled. In fact, in June 1996, his men searched the campaign office in the Russian White House and found $1.5 million in a safe inside deputy finance minister German Kuznetsov’s office. The next day … Streletsky busted Arkady Yevstafyev and Sergei Lisovsky … coming out of the White House carrying $500,000 in a Xerox paper box. According to Korzhakov, the campaign delivered packages like that all over the country to buy off regional elites and secure votes. When asked by Novaya gazeta about campaign funding in 1999, Lisovsky responded, “And where is the money going to come from? Last time [i.e., in 1996] the bulk of the money was Western. “ …

    That the West helped pay for Yeltsin’s campaign is an open secret. … Yeltsin was supported by Western money. … the IMF supplied Yeltsin with a transfer in a timely way. No one asked where the money went. It went to support companies, to support oligarchs, technocrats, the presidential team. Everyone pretended not to see this. Strobe Talbott lamented, “We were enablers. … working with Yeltsin and his key advisers to try to find some way to get him reelected without giving the oligarchs free rein over the economy.” … and the results devastated Russia’s democracy and its economy.

    Yeltsin handedly won reelection in July 1996. … Yeltsin’s political comeback was hardly free or fair; allegations of widespread electoral fraud abounded. Western election monitors either ignored or dismissed these claims. … “the US embassy warned the USAID staff in Moscow to keep their distance from monitoring efforts. Unofficially, they were told of worries that fraud benefiting Yeltsin might be uncovered.”

    Even the head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Russia mission, Michael Meadowcroft, has since admitted that his bosses pressured him to declare the elections clean. “The West let Russia down, and it’s a shame,” he said. …

    The United States described its meddling in Russia throughout the 1990s … to help build Russian democracy. … Russians view the height of American political involvement not as the emergence of demokratiya(democracy), but as really existing dermokratiya ($#@!ocracy). …

    a 2000 congressional evaluation of the Clinton administration’s Russia policy put it: “By pursuing a policy of ‘reform’ that required the political victory of their reformers by whatever means necessary, the administration undermined the democratic process itself.” …
    "Let it not be said that we did nothing." - Dr. Ron Paul. "Stand up for what you believe in, even if you are standing alone." - Sophie Magdalena Scholl
    "War is the health of the State." - Randolph Bourne "Freedom is the answer. ... Now, what's the question?" - Ernie Hancock.



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