In a word yes. Just as in OTL Russia is struggling with crumbling infrastructure and restless minorities. Only now there are more of them for the Russians and the UIS to deal with
Zhirinovsky's Russian Empire
- Thread starter Pellegrino
- Start date
In a word yes. Just as in OTL Russia is struggling with crumbling infrastructure and restless minorities. Only now there are more of them for the Russians and the UIS to deal with
That depends on whether the minorities with land claims are still there and alive when the repression eases off...
Bruce
MarshalBraginsky
Banned
Something tells me that the North Caucasus would definitely be different. Also, how's Z-man dealing with the Cossack cultural revival?
So what I'm gathering here is we're seeing the continuation of the Cold War, although its not really as pronounced as the one between the USSR and USA.
How does the UIS feed itself? IOTL, the USSR's inefficient agriculture required it to use oil revenues to import grain from the west. ITTL, because the UIS is still a planned economy, and the UN has an oil embargo, how does the UIS satisfy its food requirements? Like North Korea, that is to blackmail other countries to give food aid while trumpeting them internally as proof of the UIS' greatness?
Doubtful. In TTL the integrity of Russia's borders are even moreimportant than they are OTL. Although Russia may entertain allowing a RSR to become an independent UIS republic, that would be as far as they would go (and in such a situation look for a situation where Russia controls the Republic and uses it to stack the UIS parliament so it votes the same as Russia (much like what Milosovic did with Kosovo).
In many ways much better. They fit a political role for this new UIS and many, even those alive, are being bestowed with honors like habit novo gorods being named after them. But there is still the overall decline in the standard of living that will affect everyone
Yes, but there is not a unified opposition other an NATO. We already see Russia is close to mending fences with India. And look for other countries to ease up on sanctions after the election
Well, the UN sanctions have an interesting provision. Much like Cuba's sanctions that the USA Imposed, they are connected to the perception that Russia is a dictatorship and the sanctions will remain until there are free elections. The occupation of Yugoslavia is not a deal killer anymore, thanks to the Split Peace Accord (there is a perception that, to an extent, that matter has been addressed) and countries like China will not agree to sanctions based on an occupation of former Soviet Republics. So look for these sanctions to bend after this election.
The last election was a referendum, (yes or no vote only) but now Z has to run in a general election against other actual candidates. This is the same as OTL when Yeltsin had a referendum in April and the Duma had elections in September of 1993. Only difference is Z has to run in the September election as well whereas Yeltsin was retained until the 1996 presidential election
MarshalBraginsky
Banned
So is he going off against the Communists and many others? Also, what is the status of the Russian group Pamyat? IOTL they broke off into two separate groups, and I'm not sure how Russian neo-fascist groups would fare with Zhirinovsky in charge.
I probably won't have time to read through all of what you have so far, but I've heard this TL is great so far and really well researched.
PART FORTY TWO: DEMOCRACY AT ITS WORSE
PART FORTY TWO: DEMOCRACY AT ITS WORSE
PART FORTY TWO: DEMOCRACY AT ITS WORSE
A few new names that we are introduced to in this update...
Political Campaign advisor George Gorton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gorton
LDPR politician Mikhail Musatov
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Musatov
Also, keep in mind, the article about George Gorton was, in TTL, written right before the 1996 Russian presidential election and is looking back at the 1993 election while comparing it to the 1996 election. Needless to say, if you miss that point it may cause come confusion.
UIS Presidential Candidate Vladimir Putin in an interview with the BBC on August 1, 2011.
Discussing the election of 1993.
BBC: Why did the candidate that you supported, Mikhail Arutyunov, fare so poorly. Independent polls put him up by as much as 30-points after the referendum. How did he squander that?
Putin: There were numerous reasons. Nobody wanted to compromise except, ironically, Zhirinovsky. You had six major pro-democratic parties which refused to back down and support each other. You had the Communists who tried to move to the right of Zhirinovsky but in the process alienated ordinary Russians who feared a restored USSR. Even his ballot placement hurt him.
BBC: What do you mean?
Putin: Keep in mind that we wanted to make sure ballot access was easy, very easy. We didn’t want the UN to say viable candidates were prevented from running by restrictive ballot access laws. As a result there were 112 candidates running for President! 112! And unfortunately for Mikhail Arutyunov, while incumbent president Zhirinovsky was #1 on the ballot, Arutyunov was #77, between the Free Vodka for Russia Party candidate and a candidate for a political party called the Black Mud of the Volga, which nobody knew anything about other than it had a terrible name.
BBC: But Arutyunov had a surprising amount of airtime on the LDP controlled state media, certainly more than the Black Mud of the Volga or the Free Vodka Party.
Putin: Yes he did. But all he did was squander it with terrible speeches. And, unlike Zhirinovsky, he didn’t understand how effective negative campaigning was until it was too late.
The One That Got Away: American Political Consultant George Gorton remembers the historical Russian presidential election of 1993
By Mitch Kruger
Time Magazine
June 13, 1996
George Gorton remembers watching the 1993 Russian elections from the sidelines
As Republican political consultant George Gorton watches CNN, he chuckles as he watches Russian President Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s feeble attempts to play to a disinterested crowd.
“You can’t seem desperate,” he said with a laugh, “that is fatal for any politician. And right now he just stinks of desperation.”
The Russian President already appears resigned to his fate, with elections just a few days away, there is little question that he will not be reelected as Russia’s president. His poll numbers are hovering around 20% and he trails three other candidates.
“Gennady Burbulis and Vladimir Putin look poised to face off against each other after the first round of voting this week,” Gorton said with a smile, “although I suppose you can’t count out the Communists and Gennady Zyuganov. Zyuganov has done a good job repackaging his party since 1993.”
What is becoming increasingly clear is that lightning will not strike twice for the controversial Russian president. 1996 will not look anything like 1993, when he clawed his way back from a double digit deficit in the polls to upset the opposition candidate Mikhail Arutyunov. Even Vladimir Zhirinovsky seems resigned to his fate, indicating he will run for president of the UIS if he loses the Russian presidential election this month. President of the UIS is a largely ceremonial position, and the UIS President holds little real power. But for the bombastic Zhirinovsky it would give him one thing he would desperately need if this election ends in a defeat: immunity from prosecution.
“To be honest, I don’t think Vladimir Zhirinovsky will ever win another election in Russia, and certainly not an election across the entire UIS where he is extremely unpopular” Gorton said, “I don’t think he can win an election as local garbage man in his hometown. He’s done! It’s a shame its taken so long for this day to come, but the world is finally going to be rid of that clown.”
For George Gorton, watching Vladimir Zhirinovsky plunge Russia and the UIS deeper into recession and poverty these last three years, while fighting costly wars across Europe and Asia, was a bitter pill to swallow. Gorton truly believed that Vladimir Zhirinovsky was finished back in 1993; all he needed was an opponent who was willing to run an effective campaign. Something that Gorton was well poised, and well qualified, to help someone do.
“When President Kerrey approached me and asked me if I would be willing to help I jumped at the opportunity,” Gorton recalled, “I knew this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to bring democracy to the Soviet Union. And quite frankly, I saw how badly many of these candidates were faring on their own.”
Initially the Americans contacted former Prime Minister Ivan Silayev, who was the most reform minded candidate on the ballot. However, it was quickly decided that Silayev was simply not a viable candidate.
“We were initially optimistic that Silayev could pull it off,” Gorton recalled, “but once we did our homework we realized he was a lost cause.”
Although polling at 6% initially, Gorton’s independent pollsters found that Silayev had little appeal to ordinary Russians who resented the fact that he fled to Germany during the revolution the previous year. Many also blamed him directly for the disastrous effects of “shock therapy”, economic reforms implemented in the midst of harsh international sanctions that destroyed the Russian economy.
“We hoped that we could build on his approval ratings,” Gorton said, “but those six percent who supported Silayev were very, very lukewarm on him according to our polls, and over 80% of Russians we polled had a highly unfavorable view of him. He was never going to poll higher than 6-8%.”
The decision to abandon Silayev’s campaign was made easier when Silayev announced that he would not campaign inside of Russia, electing instead to continue operating from Germany.
“He was dead in the water once he made that announcement,” Gorton added, “no way you can win an election in Russia while hiding out in Germany. We knew we had to give up on him at that point.”
Silayev’s campaign never recovered from his decision to stay in Germany, and much of his campaigning was done by hiring young men to hand out flyers in central Moscow.
“It was a mess,” Gorton added, “We could have told him the folly of that strategy. But the kids he had hired didn’t want to stand out in the street and hand out flyers. Half the time they would just leave them on the sidewalk and sometimes even throw them away. It created a strong visual image that played to Silayev’s weakness: you’d see a stack of unattended flyers and were reminded that Ivan Silayev couldn’t be bothered to come back to Russia to campaign.”
It was at this point that Gorton and his aids decided to contact the only other viable candidate on the ballot: Mikhail Arutyunov.
“At first we were very reluctant,” Gorton recalled, “he seemed to burn the reformers by siding with the military. But once we met him we were blown away. Although the popular view is that he was a disastrous politician, he was a lot better than people realized. He was surprisingly crafty.”
Mikhail Arutyunov, who had earned a reputation the previous year as an opponent of the UIS federation and of all operations conducted by the military, assured Gorton and the other Americans that he was not willing to give the military’s sixteen-man committee for state security and defense a free pass. Still, he needed to calm fears in the military in order to get their support.
“Only Nixon could go to China,” Gorton recalled Arutyunov saying to him, “and he told me he needed to make peace with the military otherwise he would never be able to convince them to abandon those disastrous operations in Romania and Yugoslavia.”
Gorton also recalled how Arutyunov had successfully packaged himself as a Russian Felipe Gonzalez, who was prime minister of Spain at the time.
“Gonzalez was a former opponent of the Franco regime,” Gorton said, “a staunch socialist who spent time in Paris in his youth with the Socialist International. He was a socialist trade unionist in Spain who opposed everything that Franco represented. But when he became prime minister he gave the military a lot of leeway in dealing with the Basques. He proved to be a good friend to the military in fact. This appealed to the 16-man committee. They regarded Gonzalez as the model of what the perfect Russian leader should be: someone who could appeal to the west but would let them stamp out the Chechen rebellion much like how Gonzalez was stamping out ETA.”
Initially it appeared that Gorton would be hired on to head the campaign of the popular opposition leader. Arutyunov promised to bring him out to Moscow within the week. But problems soon emerged.
“We never received our tickets or our visas,” Gorton recalled, “so we called his office up, only to be told that he was not going to need our services.”
As the campaign kicked off, Arutyunov was stung by a barrage of negative ads that portrayed him as a stool pigeon for the Americans. Coupled with bad political advice from inside his inner circle, his campaign immediately floundered.
“I hate to say it, but there was a lot of corruption in Arutyunov’s inner circle,” Gorton said, “and those people didn’t want to see a bunch of Americans coming in and asking questions about how the money was being spent. So they got into his ear and told him that if he brought us in it would be political suicide. That the Russian people would start to believe that he was in fact in the pocket of the Americans.”
They also told Arutyunov to repackage himself in a way that shocked Gorton.
“I know this sounds mean,” Gorton recalled, “but Mikhail Arutyunov sort of looks like Abe Simpson. What they did was to try and sell him as an old, bitter angry man, thinking that was what people wanted. Well, it wasn’t what people wanted, and unfortunately for Arutyunov, he looked the part.”
Arutyunov's campaign photo
Rather than play to the youth, which flocked to his movement back in 1991 during the failed Soviet coup, Arutyunov portrayed himself as a hard man in the mold of the czars of the past, something that did not play to his strengths.
“He was a warm and likeable person,” Gorton added, “but in his speeches and in his campaign commercials you saw none of that. And as the election went on, our independent polling was showing something frightening: although people were not growing to dislike Arutyunov, they were growing to ignore him, which was worse.”
Arutyunov was not helped by the role that the Russian state media played in covering the election either.
“The Russian state television stations would broadcast everything they could on the election and every candidate endlessly,” Gorton recalled, “and with 112 candidates there was no news on TV except campaign news. I know this sounds crazy, but I really think that the Liberal Democratic Party did that on purpose. People were getting sick of the political coverage, and Arutyunov was giving the same dull speech over and over again. These speeches would be played without interruption every night on the news. Even popular television programs were being pushed to the side to give Arutyunov time to give his one, uninspired speech.”
Gorton would recall how on one night, Mikhail Arutyunov saw his poll numbers drop 10 points after a speech in Moscow turned many Russians against him.
“The Russian television networks interrupted the 1993 Ice Hockey World Championship finals between Sweden and Russia to broadcast Arutyunov’s speech on May 2nd,” Gorton said. “All across Russia people were screaming at their television sets over the interruption. And you know what the worst thing about it was? You remember that movie that came out in 1993, Groundhog Day, staring Bill Murray? It was like that movie. It was the same damn speech he gave a thousand times before! Everyone in Russia knew that same speech word for word!”
Mikhail Arutyunov's shortly after his infamous "hockey speech"
Gorton was beside himself as he watched Arutyunov blow his commanding lead in the polls, desperate to jump in and try and save the faltering campaign. He even tried to contact other candidates to see if they would drop out of the race and back Arutyunov.
“Silayev was gaining no traction in the polls, as we expected, so we asked him if he would drop out and support Arutyunov,” Gorton recalled, “but he refused. He saw the same thing we did, Arutyunov was imploding and he figured he might be able to take the momentum at any moment.”
The final blow came over what should have been a tremendous overstep by the Russian President in his attempt to smear his opponent.
“One night, the candidate for the Free Vodka Party came on TV and spoke while in the middle of a drunken stupor,” Gorton recalled, “at the time I assumed that would be the most absurd thing I would see on television that night. But then Zhirinovsky came on holding a bank check and screaming about ‘Arutyunov’s treason.’”
Candidate for the Free Vodka Party of Russia on Russian state TV
In what became a literal knife in the heart of the opposition candidate, it was revealed on Russian news that his political party, the Party for a Free and Democratic Russia, accepted a small donation for his election campaign from an organization calling itself the ‘Islamic Front for the Liberation of Chechnya’, the same name of the terrorist group that tried to assassinate the Russian President earlier that summer.
“Zhirinovsky was waving the check around on television calling it an insult to the Russian people,” Gorton recalled, “as soon as I saw that I jumped up and picked up the phone.”
Within three hours Gorton was able to establish that the bank account was opened by a 21-year old college student from St. Petersburg who also headed the local chapter of the Liberal Democratic Party at his university. To the American, it was abundantly clear that the Zhirinovsky was trying to set up Arutyunov, and was overplaying his hand in the process. But tragically, the smear campaign proved effective.
“It should have been dealt with immediately,” Gorton said, “If I could have found out that information in three hours from my telephone in California then Arutyunov’s people should have been able to do the same. But they wanted to bury it. They were afraid that it could come out how they were embezzling money out of his campaign account. As a result Mikhail Arutyunov never responded to that devastating attack from Zhirinovsky.”
Over the next three weeks Vladimir Zhirinovsky was seldom seen in public without that check, all the while Gorton desperately tried to call the Russian opposition leader and convince him to let him help. But he never got through until it was too late.
“On Election day I finally reached him,” Gorton recalled, “I told him he needed to go out and be seen helping people. He couldn’t stay home at this hour.”
Arutyunov, the wily politician, seemed to recognize that he misplayed his hand.
“I am sorry George,” Gorton recalled Arutyunov saying through his translator; “I should have let you help. Now it is too late.”
For Gorton, it was those words that haunted him. Because deep down he knew, that was Mikhail Arutyunov’s election to lose. That was the one that got away.
20 years ago: Democracy at its worse in Russia
By John Makela, NBC News correspondent
January 2, 2013
“We are somewhat new to democracy,” said Russian journalist Alexi Dutov somewhat sheepishly, “we haven’t yet figured it our just yet…but we are getting better at it!”
I smiled and said nothing. I didn’t want to say what was on my mind and on the minds of every foreign journalist at the rally that day: the Russians were not “getting better” at democracy. In fact, it had gotten much, much worse. This was democracy at its very worse. It was one part circus act and one part Nazi political rally, with a dash of ridiculous empty promises thrown in for good measure. We all stood around as the crowd chanted his name, awaiting his arrival.
“Slava Zhirinovskomu! Glory to Zhirinovsky!” the crowd chanted over and over again as the speaker on the podium, Moscow LDPR chairperson Mikhail Musatov, riled up the crowds by holding his hand to his ear to signify that he couldn’t hear them.
I looked over at the rookie correspondent, CNN’s 23-year old Ed Phillips, who seemed to be struggling to keep from laughing and crying at the same time.
“If Adolph Hitler had become a wrestling promoter instead of the dictator of Germany, I imagine this is what his events would look like,” he said to me as he rolled his eyes.
Suddenly the crowd erupted as a seemingly unconscious Vladimir Zhirinovsky was wheeled out on a wheel chair by a pretty college-aged girl dressed up like a stripper nurse. He was covered in a blanket as he reached the stage.
“Comrade Zhirinovsky,” the man behind the podium said into the microphone, “you cannot! You are too weak from your injuries!”
The crowd erupted in disapproval.
“I am sorry comrades,” he continued saying to the crowd, “but due to the vile, and despicable terrorist attack on our great leader he is too weak to speak here today-”
The crowd erupted again as the man standing next to me yelled “death to the Chechens!”
“-we must take him to the hospital! We cannot wait, his life is in jeopardy!”
Ed Phillips looked over at me again.
“Spoiler alert here,” he said sarcastically, “but this is where he pulls a Hulk Hogan and jumps out of the wheelchair.”
As if on cue, the chants of “Slava Zhirinovskomu” seemed to awaken the unconscious Russian President, who put forth a comical performance of struggling to get out of the wheelchair as the crowd cheered him on.
“No Mr. President!” the man at the podium said in a performance worthy of a Razzie. “You mustn’t, you could…die!”
“Then let me die for Mother Russia!” Zhirinovsky yelled at the top of his lungs as the crowd went crazy.
“I challenge any terrorist here in the crowd today to finish the job your Chechen pigs started,” Zhirinovsky said as he extended his arms and put his chest out as if inviting a sniper or gunman to shoot him. “But keep in mind, you can kill me, but you cannot kill the will of the Russian people!”
Again the crowd erupted, and the man standing next to me who called for the “Death to Chechens” began screaming indecipherable babble at the top of his lungs, as if he were a teenage girl at a New Kids on the Block concert.
“The Russian people will never forget what you, and your American allies tried to do to our beloved Mother Russia, as we proudly moved into our first democratic election!” Zhirinovsky screamed into the microphone as the stripper nurse began jumping up and down behind him, “You tried to kill me because you hate freedom! Because you hate democracy! But democracy is stronger than a bullet! And the Russian people are stronger than one trillion bullets!”
Ed Phillips began to roll his eyes again as he looked over at me.
“The Russian people can’t be buying into this charade,” he said firmly, “this is an absolute joke.”
I wanted to have his confidence that everyone would see through this act, but I knew better. For all of his comic theatrics, I saw the evolution of Vladimir Zhirinovsky in the summer of 1993 into an adept politician, and that speech was living proof of it. I remember feeling my heart sink into my stomach when I heard the line about ‘a trillion bullets’. I knew that the message resonated with the Russian people. Not just the obvious fascist like the man next to me who appeared close to wetting himself. This was a message that usurped the core message of all of his opponents and wrapped it together into a simple, easily digestible package that would resonate with every Russian: ‘we must stand united against terrorism.’ Regardless of if you were a Communist and supported Gennady Zyuganov, you still feared the growing independence movement of the Chechens and Georgians and you were angry at the Americans for supporting them. If you were a democrat you were worried about this assault on democracy and the growing emergence of a dictatorship in Chechnya. And you were angry at the American role in supporting this ‘dictatorship within a democracy’. And if you were a neo-fascist, well, you just liked this message, period. I suddenly realized that, for a man who despised democracy and despised having to go through the process of an election, Vladimir Zhirinovsky was surprisingly adept at it. Take away the clown act and what you had was a surprisingly adept politician who was able to convey a simple message while stealing momentum from all of his opponents.
I knew as a journalist I was trained not to let these things rattle me, but I had to admit, it did. After several years covering the news in Moscow I grew to love Russia and the Russian people, but here I was watching them become hypnotized by this clearly orchestrated production, and I knew the end result would be poverty. And sanctions. And possibly even war. That night Ed Phillips and I grabbed a beer at the hotel as we sat and watched the local news spin the day’s event on the television. The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia still controlled the Russian television network, VGTRK, and they were having a field day with Zhirinovsky’s performance, editing out anything that made Zhirinovsky look like…Zhirinovsky. In fact, much of the report featured close ups on the stripper nurse’s chest.
“Damn, they almost made him sound normal,” Ed Phillips said as he sipped his beer, “almost.”
It was at that point that CBC correspondent Timothy Lemieux joined us at the hotel bar. He pulled up a chair next to us and sat down.
“How was the Mikhail Arutyunov rally,” I asked as Tim sipped his beer.
“It was possibly the worse political rally I ever saw,” he said solemnly, “Arutyunov is the worst politician ever. He is trying to portray himself as a dour, stoic, and pro military. It’s like he’s trying to be Richard Nixon.”
“Still, he is very popular on the street with the everyday Russian,” Ed Phillips replied. “They still remember how he held the dying Boris Yeltsin in his arms when he was shot on that tank, and how he opposed the coup in 1991.”
“That was then and this is now,” Lemieux replied, “He has alienated his core base: former Yeltsin supporters who want to see a freer and more democratic Russia. And right now he is convinced that the Russian people want to see a stoic leader who never smiles. In the process he is putting everyone to sleep.”
Even back in 1993 I knew he was right. Although most American journalists were convinced Arutyunov was going to win the election and win big, we saw something else: he was embarking on a disastrous campaign. Stung by reports that he was “in the pocket of the Americans” he refused the assistance of American campaign advisors who would have seen prevented the train wreck that was his campaign. Even as the LDP-controlled state media was giving him comparable air time to the president, he was squandering it with boring speeches that never varied from his well prepared but poorly though out script. His campaign commercials featured traditional Russian patriotic music while featuring a collection of still photos of the elderly Arutyunov looking stoic, a sharp contrast to Zhirinovsky’s which resembled rock videos. He was boring. Zhirinovsky was exciting. While Arutyunov had no idea how to appeal to the voters, after every rally Zhirinovsky was able to turn himself into the topic of conversation all over the country, even with those who hated him. Zhirinovsky had the “it” factor as we say in America.
Despite everything, I still suppose that Arutyunov could have won the election in 1993. He did everything wrong, but a lot of Russians saw through Zhirinovsky’s circus act and knew he was leading the country over the cliff. Had Ivan Silayev not formed his own political party then perhaps his supporters would have swallowed their pride and supported Arutyunov. Had the pro-Yeltsin Democratic Choice Party also elected to support Arutyunov perhaps he could have won. Or had Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov been able to woo more former communists fed up with Zhirinovsky perhaps he would have pulled it off as well. A lot had to go right for the Liberal Democratic Party to pull off a Zhirinovsky victory. But in the end, on Election Day, Vladimir Zhirinovsky had momentum on his side. All he needed was something to push him over the hump, which tragically he got when the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Chechnya set off a dozen car bombs at voting stations across the country as the Russian people went off to vote.
Car bombing kills at least 100 as Russians go to the polls
By Tim Pullman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 15, 1993; 1:18 PM
A car bomb near a voting center in Moscow kills three while injuring 15
MOSCOW, UIS – As Russians flocked to the polls for the first multiparty democratic election in their history, at least eight car bombs exploded near crowded voting centers across the country, killing scores of innocent civilians. Early reports are that at least 103 Russians are dead, with nearly one thousand listed as injured in the attacks. The Islamic Front for the Liberation of Chechnya, a terrorist organization with ties to both Grozny and Islamabad, has claimed responsibility for the attacks and say they are in response to Russia’s occupation of the “Caliphate of Chechnya.”
Three of the eight bombs went off in Moscow while five others exploded at voting sites inside the Republic of Ingushetia, which borders the breakaway Chechen Republic. However, it was at the voting center in Moscow’s Gorky Park, the site of Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s infamous stand against the Communist coup back in 1991 where the largest number of casualties has been reported.
“At least fifty people are believed to have been killed in Gorky Park,” commented a nurse who arrived at the scene shortly after the explosion, “there were so many people in line packed next to each other when the bomb went off.”
Russian President Vladimir Zhirinovsky arrived at the scene within the hour and was seen assisting with the rescue efforts. At one point the normally bombastic Russian president was seen openly weeping.
“I never had the chance to vote today,” Zhirinovsky told the Russian media during an impromptu press conference, “but right now it is not about this election. It is about helping, in any way that I can, helping these poor, poor people.”
One man who was carried off by medical personnel tried to speak to the Russian president before he was loaded onto an ambulance. Injured and unable to speak above a whisper, his efforts were not ignored by the Russian President.
“Comrade, I can hear you!” Zhirinovsky said firmly, “and all of Russia can hear you! And very soon the monsters who did this will hear from all of us!”
PART FORTY TWO: DEMOCRACY AT ITS WORSE
A few new names that we are introduced to in this update...
Political Campaign advisor George Gorton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gorton
LDPR politician Mikhail Musatov
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Musatov
Also, keep in mind, the article about George Gorton was, in TTL, written right before the 1996 Russian presidential election and is looking back at the 1993 election while comparing it to the 1996 election. Needless to say, if you miss that point it may cause come confusion.
UIS Presidential Candidate Vladimir Putin in an interview with the BBC on August 1, 2011.
Discussing the election of 1993.
BBC: Why did the candidate that you supported, Mikhail Arutyunov, fare so poorly. Independent polls put him up by as much as 30-points after the referendum. How did he squander that?
Putin: There were numerous reasons. Nobody wanted to compromise except, ironically, Zhirinovsky. You had six major pro-democratic parties which refused to back down and support each other. You had the Communists who tried to move to the right of Zhirinovsky but in the process alienated ordinary Russians who feared a restored USSR. Even his ballot placement hurt him.
BBC: What do you mean?
Putin: Keep in mind that we wanted to make sure ballot access was easy, very easy. We didn’t want the UN to say viable candidates were prevented from running by restrictive ballot access laws. As a result there were 112 candidates running for President! 112! And unfortunately for Mikhail Arutyunov, while incumbent president Zhirinovsky was #1 on the ballot, Arutyunov was #77, between the Free Vodka for Russia Party candidate and a candidate for a political party called the Black Mud of the Volga, which nobody knew anything about other than it had a terrible name.
BBC: But Arutyunov had a surprising amount of airtime on the LDP controlled state media, certainly more than the Black Mud of the Volga or the Free Vodka Party.
Putin: Yes he did. But all he did was squander it with terrible speeches. And, unlike Zhirinovsky, he didn’t understand how effective negative campaigning was until it was too late.
The One That Got Away: American Political Consultant George Gorton remembers the historical Russian presidential election of 1993
By Mitch Kruger
Time Magazine
June 13, 1996
George Gorton remembers watching the 1993 Russian elections from the sidelines
As Republican political consultant George Gorton watches CNN, he chuckles as he watches Russian President Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s feeble attempts to play to a disinterested crowd.
“You can’t seem desperate,” he said with a laugh, “that is fatal for any politician. And right now he just stinks of desperation.”
The Russian President already appears resigned to his fate, with elections just a few days away, there is little question that he will not be reelected as Russia’s president. His poll numbers are hovering around 20% and he trails three other candidates.
“Gennady Burbulis and Vladimir Putin look poised to face off against each other after the first round of voting this week,” Gorton said with a smile, “although I suppose you can’t count out the Communists and Gennady Zyuganov. Zyuganov has done a good job repackaging his party since 1993.”
What is becoming increasingly clear is that lightning will not strike twice for the controversial Russian president. 1996 will not look anything like 1993, when he clawed his way back from a double digit deficit in the polls to upset the opposition candidate Mikhail Arutyunov. Even Vladimir Zhirinovsky seems resigned to his fate, indicating he will run for president of the UIS if he loses the Russian presidential election this month. President of the UIS is a largely ceremonial position, and the UIS President holds little real power. But for the bombastic Zhirinovsky it would give him one thing he would desperately need if this election ends in a defeat: immunity from prosecution.
“To be honest, I don’t think Vladimir Zhirinovsky will ever win another election in Russia, and certainly not an election across the entire UIS where he is extremely unpopular” Gorton said, “I don’t think he can win an election as local garbage man in his hometown. He’s done! It’s a shame its taken so long for this day to come, but the world is finally going to be rid of that clown.”
For George Gorton, watching Vladimir Zhirinovsky plunge Russia and the UIS deeper into recession and poverty these last three years, while fighting costly wars across Europe and Asia, was a bitter pill to swallow. Gorton truly believed that Vladimir Zhirinovsky was finished back in 1993; all he needed was an opponent who was willing to run an effective campaign. Something that Gorton was well poised, and well qualified, to help someone do.
“When President Kerrey approached me and asked me if I would be willing to help I jumped at the opportunity,” Gorton recalled, “I knew this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to bring democracy to the Soviet Union. And quite frankly, I saw how badly many of these candidates were faring on their own.”
Initially the Americans contacted former Prime Minister Ivan Silayev, who was the most reform minded candidate on the ballot. However, it was quickly decided that Silayev was simply not a viable candidate.
“We were initially optimistic that Silayev could pull it off,” Gorton recalled, “but once we did our homework we realized he was a lost cause.”
Although polling at 6% initially, Gorton’s independent pollsters found that Silayev had little appeal to ordinary Russians who resented the fact that he fled to Germany during the revolution the previous year. Many also blamed him directly for the disastrous effects of “shock therapy”, economic reforms implemented in the midst of harsh international sanctions that destroyed the Russian economy.
“We hoped that we could build on his approval ratings,” Gorton said, “but those six percent who supported Silayev were very, very lukewarm on him according to our polls, and over 80% of Russians we polled had a highly unfavorable view of him. He was never going to poll higher than 6-8%.”
The decision to abandon Silayev’s campaign was made easier when Silayev announced that he would not campaign inside of Russia, electing instead to continue operating from Germany.
“He was dead in the water once he made that announcement,” Gorton added, “no way you can win an election in Russia while hiding out in Germany. We knew we had to give up on him at that point.”
Silayev’s campaign never recovered from his decision to stay in Germany, and much of his campaigning was done by hiring young men to hand out flyers in central Moscow.
“It was a mess,” Gorton added, “We could have told him the folly of that strategy. But the kids he had hired didn’t want to stand out in the street and hand out flyers. Half the time they would just leave them on the sidewalk and sometimes even throw them away. It created a strong visual image that played to Silayev’s weakness: you’d see a stack of unattended flyers and were reminded that Ivan Silayev couldn’t be bothered to come back to Russia to campaign.”
It was at this point that Gorton and his aids decided to contact the only other viable candidate on the ballot: Mikhail Arutyunov.
“At first we were very reluctant,” Gorton recalled, “he seemed to burn the reformers by siding with the military. But once we met him we were blown away. Although the popular view is that he was a disastrous politician, he was a lot better than people realized. He was surprisingly crafty.”
Mikhail Arutyunov, who had earned a reputation the previous year as an opponent of the UIS federation and of all operations conducted by the military, assured Gorton and the other Americans that he was not willing to give the military’s sixteen-man committee for state security and defense a free pass. Still, he needed to calm fears in the military in order to get their support.
“Only Nixon could go to China,” Gorton recalled Arutyunov saying to him, “and he told me he needed to make peace with the military otherwise he would never be able to convince them to abandon those disastrous operations in Romania and Yugoslavia.”
Gorton also recalled how Arutyunov had successfully packaged himself as a Russian Felipe Gonzalez, who was prime minister of Spain at the time.
“Gonzalez was a former opponent of the Franco regime,” Gorton said, “a staunch socialist who spent time in Paris in his youth with the Socialist International. He was a socialist trade unionist in Spain who opposed everything that Franco represented. But when he became prime minister he gave the military a lot of leeway in dealing with the Basques. He proved to be a good friend to the military in fact. This appealed to the 16-man committee. They regarded Gonzalez as the model of what the perfect Russian leader should be: someone who could appeal to the west but would let them stamp out the Chechen rebellion much like how Gonzalez was stamping out ETA.”
Initially it appeared that Gorton would be hired on to head the campaign of the popular opposition leader. Arutyunov promised to bring him out to Moscow within the week. But problems soon emerged.
“We never received our tickets or our visas,” Gorton recalled, “so we called his office up, only to be told that he was not going to need our services.”
As the campaign kicked off, Arutyunov was stung by a barrage of negative ads that portrayed him as a stool pigeon for the Americans. Coupled with bad political advice from inside his inner circle, his campaign immediately floundered.
“I hate to say it, but there was a lot of corruption in Arutyunov’s inner circle,” Gorton said, “and those people didn’t want to see a bunch of Americans coming in and asking questions about how the money was being spent. So they got into his ear and told him that if he brought us in it would be political suicide. That the Russian people would start to believe that he was in fact in the pocket of the Americans.”
They also told Arutyunov to repackage himself in a way that shocked Gorton.
“I know this sounds mean,” Gorton recalled, “but Mikhail Arutyunov sort of looks like Abe Simpson. What they did was to try and sell him as an old, bitter angry man, thinking that was what people wanted. Well, it wasn’t what people wanted, and unfortunately for Arutyunov, he looked the part.”
Arutyunov's campaign photo
Rather than play to the youth, which flocked to his movement back in 1991 during the failed Soviet coup, Arutyunov portrayed himself as a hard man in the mold of the czars of the past, something that did not play to his strengths.
“He was a warm and likeable person,” Gorton added, “but in his speeches and in his campaign commercials you saw none of that. And as the election went on, our independent polling was showing something frightening: although people were not growing to dislike Arutyunov, they were growing to ignore him, which was worse.”
Arutyunov was not helped by the role that the Russian state media played in covering the election either.
“The Russian state television stations would broadcast everything they could on the election and every candidate endlessly,” Gorton recalled, “and with 112 candidates there was no news on TV except campaign news. I know this sounds crazy, but I really think that the Liberal Democratic Party did that on purpose. People were getting sick of the political coverage, and Arutyunov was giving the same dull speech over and over again. These speeches would be played without interruption every night on the news. Even popular television programs were being pushed to the side to give Arutyunov time to give his one, uninspired speech.”
Gorton would recall how on one night, Mikhail Arutyunov saw his poll numbers drop 10 points after a speech in Moscow turned many Russians against him.
“The Russian television networks interrupted the 1993 Ice Hockey World Championship finals between Sweden and Russia to broadcast Arutyunov’s speech on May 2nd,” Gorton said. “All across Russia people were screaming at their television sets over the interruption. And you know what the worst thing about it was? You remember that movie that came out in 1993, Groundhog Day, staring Bill Murray? It was like that movie. It was the same damn speech he gave a thousand times before! Everyone in Russia knew that same speech word for word!”
Mikhail Arutyunov's shortly after his infamous "hockey speech"
Gorton was beside himself as he watched Arutyunov blow his commanding lead in the polls, desperate to jump in and try and save the faltering campaign. He even tried to contact other candidates to see if they would drop out of the race and back Arutyunov.
“Silayev was gaining no traction in the polls, as we expected, so we asked him if he would drop out and support Arutyunov,” Gorton recalled, “but he refused. He saw the same thing we did, Arutyunov was imploding and he figured he might be able to take the momentum at any moment.”
The final blow came over what should have been a tremendous overstep by the Russian President in his attempt to smear his opponent.
“One night, the candidate for the Free Vodka Party came on TV and spoke while in the middle of a drunken stupor,” Gorton recalled, “at the time I assumed that would be the most absurd thing I would see on television that night. But then Zhirinovsky came on holding a bank check and screaming about ‘Arutyunov’s treason.’”
Candidate for the Free Vodka Party of Russia on Russian state TV
In what became a literal knife in the heart of the opposition candidate, it was revealed on Russian news that his political party, the Party for a Free and Democratic Russia, accepted a small donation for his election campaign from an organization calling itself the ‘Islamic Front for the Liberation of Chechnya’, the same name of the terrorist group that tried to assassinate the Russian President earlier that summer.
“Zhirinovsky was waving the check around on television calling it an insult to the Russian people,” Gorton recalled, “as soon as I saw that I jumped up and picked up the phone.”
Within three hours Gorton was able to establish that the bank account was opened by a 21-year old college student from St. Petersburg who also headed the local chapter of the Liberal Democratic Party at his university. To the American, it was abundantly clear that the Zhirinovsky was trying to set up Arutyunov, and was overplaying his hand in the process. But tragically, the smear campaign proved effective.
“It should have been dealt with immediately,” Gorton said, “If I could have found out that information in three hours from my telephone in California then Arutyunov’s people should have been able to do the same. But they wanted to bury it. They were afraid that it could come out how they were embezzling money out of his campaign account. As a result Mikhail Arutyunov never responded to that devastating attack from Zhirinovsky.”
Over the next three weeks Vladimir Zhirinovsky was seldom seen in public without that check, all the while Gorton desperately tried to call the Russian opposition leader and convince him to let him help. But he never got through until it was too late.
“On Election day I finally reached him,” Gorton recalled, “I told him he needed to go out and be seen helping people. He couldn’t stay home at this hour.”
Arutyunov, the wily politician, seemed to recognize that he misplayed his hand.
“I am sorry George,” Gorton recalled Arutyunov saying through his translator; “I should have let you help. Now it is too late.”
For Gorton, it was those words that haunted him. Because deep down he knew, that was Mikhail Arutyunov’s election to lose. That was the one that got away.
20 years ago: Democracy at its worse in Russia
By John Makela, NBC News correspondent
January 2, 2013
“We are somewhat new to democracy,” said Russian journalist Alexi Dutov somewhat sheepishly, “we haven’t yet figured it our just yet…but we are getting better at it!”
I smiled and said nothing. I didn’t want to say what was on my mind and on the minds of every foreign journalist at the rally that day: the Russians were not “getting better” at democracy. In fact, it had gotten much, much worse. This was democracy at its very worse. It was one part circus act and one part Nazi political rally, with a dash of ridiculous empty promises thrown in for good measure. We all stood around as the crowd chanted his name, awaiting his arrival.
“Slava Zhirinovskomu! Glory to Zhirinovsky!” the crowd chanted over and over again as the speaker on the podium, Moscow LDPR chairperson Mikhail Musatov, riled up the crowds by holding his hand to his ear to signify that he couldn’t hear them.
I looked over at the rookie correspondent, CNN’s 23-year old Ed Phillips, who seemed to be struggling to keep from laughing and crying at the same time.
“If Adolph Hitler had become a wrestling promoter instead of the dictator of Germany, I imagine this is what his events would look like,” he said to me as he rolled his eyes.
Suddenly the crowd erupted as a seemingly unconscious Vladimir Zhirinovsky was wheeled out on a wheel chair by a pretty college-aged girl dressed up like a stripper nurse. He was covered in a blanket as he reached the stage.
“Comrade Zhirinovsky,” the man behind the podium said into the microphone, “you cannot! You are too weak from your injuries!”
The crowd erupted in disapproval.
“I am sorry comrades,” he continued saying to the crowd, “but due to the vile, and despicable terrorist attack on our great leader he is too weak to speak here today-”
The crowd erupted again as the man standing next to me yelled “death to the Chechens!”
“-we must take him to the hospital! We cannot wait, his life is in jeopardy!”
Ed Phillips looked over at me again.
“Spoiler alert here,” he said sarcastically, “but this is where he pulls a Hulk Hogan and jumps out of the wheelchair.”
As if on cue, the chants of “Slava Zhirinovskomu” seemed to awaken the unconscious Russian President, who put forth a comical performance of struggling to get out of the wheelchair as the crowd cheered him on.
“No Mr. President!” the man at the podium said in a performance worthy of a Razzie. “You mustn’t, you could…die!”
“Then let me die for Mother Russia!” Zhirinovsky yelled at the top of his lungs as the crowd went crazy.
“I challenge any terrorist here in the crowd today to finish the job your Chechen pigs started,” Zhirinovsky said as he extended his arms and put his chest out as if inviting a sniper or gunman to shoot him. “But keep in mind, you can kill me, but you cannot kill the will of the Russian people!”
Again the crowd erupted, and the man standing next to me who called for the “Death to Chechens” began screaming indecipherable babble at the top of his lungs, as if he were a teenage girl at a New Kids on the Block concert.
“The Russian people will never forget what you, and your American allies tried to do to our beloved Mother Russia, as we proudly moved into our first democratic election!” Zhirinovsky screamed into the microphone as the stripper nurse began jumping up and down behind him, “You tried to kill me because you hate freedom! Because you hate democracy! But democracy is stronger than a bullet! And the Russian people are stronger than one trillion bullets!”
Ed Phillips began to roll his eyes again as he looked over at me.
“The Russian people can’t be buying into this charade,” he said firmly, “this is an absolute joke.”
I wanted to have his confidence that everyone would see through this act, but I knew better. For all of his comic theatrics, I saw the evolution of Vladimir Zhirinovsky in the summer of 1993 into an adept politician, and that speech was living proof of it. I remember feeling my heart sink into my stomach when I heard the line about ‘a trillion bullets’. I knew that the message resonated with the Russian people. Not just the obvious fascist like the man next to me who appeared close to wetting himself. This was a message that usurped the core message of all of his opponents and wrapped it together into a simple, easily digestible package that would resonate with every Russian: ‘we must stand united against terrorism.’ Regardless of if you were a Communist and supported Gennady Zyuganov, you still feared the growing independence movement of the Chechens and Georgians and you were angry at the Americans for supporting them. If you were a democrat you were worried about this assault on democracy and the growing emergence of a dictatorship in Chechnya. And you were angry at the American role in supporting this ‘dictatorship within a democracy’. And if you were a neo-fascist, well, you just liked this message, period. I suddenly realized that, for a man who despised democracy and despised having to go through the process of an election, Vladimir Zhirinovsky was surprisingly adept at it. Take away the clown act and what you had was a surprisingly adept politician who was able to convey a simple message while stealing momentum from all of his opponents.
I knew as a journalist I was trained not to let these things rattle me, but I had to admit, it did. After several years covering the news in Moscow I grew to love Russia and the Russian people, but here I was watching them become hypnotized by this clearly orchestrated production, and I knew the end result would be poverty. And sanctions. And possibly even war. That night Ed Phillips and I grabbed a beer at the hotel as we sat and watched the local news spin the day’s event on the television. The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia still controlled the Russian television network, VGTRK, and they were having a field day with Zhirinovsky’s performance, editing out anything that made Zhirinovsky look like…Zhirinovsky. In fact, much of the report featured close ups on the stripper nurse’s chest.
“Damn, they almost made him sound normal,” Ed Phillips said as he sipped his beer, “almost.”
It was at that point that CBC correspondent Timothy Lemieux joined us at the hotel bar. He pulled up a chair next to us and sat down.
“How was the Mikhail Arutyunov rally,” I asked as Tim sipped his beer.
“It was possibly the worse political rally I ever saw,” he said solemnly, “Arutyunov is the worst politician ever. He is trying to portray himself as a dour, stoic, and pro military. It’s like he’s trying to be Richard Nixon.”
“Still, he is very popular on the street with the everyday Russian,” Ed Phillips replied. “They still remember how he held the dying Boris Yeltsin in his arms when he was shot on that tank, and how he opposed the coup in 1991.”
“That was then and this is now,” Lemieux replied, “He has alienated his core base: former Yeltsin supporters who want to see a freer and more democratic Russia. And right now he is convinced that the Russian people want to see a stoic leader who never smiles. In the process he is putting everyone to sleep.”
Even back in 1993 I knew he was right. Although most American journalists were convinced Arutyunov was going to win the election and win big, we saw something else: he was embarking on a disastrous campaign. Stung by reports that he was “in the pocket of the Americans” he refused the assistance of American campaign advisors who would have seen prevented the train wreck that was his campaign. Even as the LDP-controlled state media was giving him comparable air time to the president, he was squandering it with boring speeches that never varied from his well prepared but poorly though out script. His campaign commercials featured traditional Russian patriotic music while featuring a collection of still photos of the elderly Arutyunov looking stoic, a sharp contrast to Zhirinovsky’s which resembled rock videos. He was boring. Zhirinovsky was exciting. While Arutyunov had no idea how to appeal to the voters, after every rally Zhirinovsky was able to turn himself into the topic of conversation all over the country, even with those who hated him. Zhirinovsky had the “it” factor as we say in America.
Despite everything, I still suppose that Arutyunov could have won the election in 1993. He did everything wrong, but a lot of Russians saw through Zhirinovsky’s circus act and knew he was leading the country over the cliff. Had Ivan Silayev not formed his own political party then perhaps his supporters would have swallowed their pride and supported Arutyunov. Had the pro-Yeltsin Democratic Choice Party also elected to support Arutyunov perhaps he could have won. Or had Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov been able to woo more former communists fed up with Zhirinovsky perhaps he would have pulled it off as well. A lot had to go right for the Liberal Democratic Party to pull off a Zhirinovsky victory. But in the end, on Election Day, Vladimir Zhirinovsky had momentum on his side. All he needed was something to push him over the hump, which tragically he got when the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Chechnya set off a dozen car bombs at voting stations across the country as the Russian people went off to vote.
Car bombing kills at least 100 as Russians go to the polls
By Tim Pullman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 15, 1993; 1:18 PM
A car bomb near a voting center in Moscow kills three while injuring 15
MOSCOW, UIS – As Russians flocked to the polls for the first multiparty democratic election in their history, at least eight car bombs exploded near crowded voting centers across the country, killing scores of innocent civilians. Early reports are that at least 103 Russians are dead, with nearly one thousand listed as injured in the attacks. The Islamic Front for the Liberation of Chechnya, a terrorist organization with ties to both Grozny and Islamabad, has claimed responsibility for the attacks and say they are in response to Russia’s occupation of the “Caliphate of Chechnya.”
Three of the eight bombs went off in Moscow while five others exploded at voting sites inside the Republic of Ingushetia, which borders the breakaway Chechen Republic. However, it was at the voting center in Moscow’s Gorky Park, the site of Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s infamous stand against the Communist coup back in 1991 where the largest number of casualties has been reported.
“At least fifty people are believed to have been killed in Gorky Park,” commented a nurse who arrived at the scene shortly after the explosion, “there were so many people in line packed next to each other when the bomb went off.”
Russian President Vladimir Zhirinovsky arrived at the scene within the hour and was seen assisting with the rescue efforts. At one point the normally bombastic Russian president was seen openly weeping.
“I never had the chance to vote today,” Zhirinovsky told the Russian media during an impromptu press conference, “but right now it is not about this election. It is about helping, in any way that I can, helping these poor, poor people.”
One man who was carried off by medical personnel tried to speak to the Russian president before he was loaded onto an ambulance. Injured and unable to speak above a whisper, his efforts were not ignored by the Russian President.
“Comrade, I can hear you!” Zhirinovsky said firmly, “and all of Russia can hear you! And very soon the monsters who did this will hear from all of us!”
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THANK YOU!!!
I deeply appreciate the nod, and I won't lie, I hope I pull it off. Although I have seen some of the other TL's I'm up against, and I realize this TL has some very strong competition.
Thank you! I realize that it is pretty long at this point, and I have only gone through two years in TTL!
But I am honored that it is making some noise as a worthy addition to this board