MOST OBSERVERS OF RUSSIA’S historic presidential election on July 3 believed that Boris Yeltsin and his colleagues had made a dramatic bid for reelection and won. But Time magazine’s ensuing cover story, “Yanks to the Rescue,” by chief political correspondent Michael Kramer, and the ABC news Nightline feature “Secret Weapon,” aired July 8, had a different take. They chose to downplay the greatest political event of the decade — the triumph of democrats and democracy in the first direct election of a head of state in Russia in a thousand years — and featured instead three American consultants who allegedly won the race for Boris Yeltsin. As one of these men boasted on Nightline, “We have brought democracy to the evil empire and the world will be forever changed because of it.” This is ludicrous.
The pieces both in Time and on Nightline get the facts wrong, exaggerate the importance of the Americans, insult the intelligence and sophistication of the Russians who really orchestrated the campaign victory, embarrass American journalism, and taint the legitimate achievements of Americans who have lived and worked in Russia for years to strengthen that country’s nascent democratic institutions.
Kramer’s story is suspicious from the beginning. We learn that the three Americans, George Gorton, Joe Shumate, and Richard Dresner, were hired by Oleg Soskovets, a former first deputy prime minister whom Yeltsin named head of his campaign team in January. As even the casual student of Russian politics knows, Soskovets was one of the true bad guys in Yeltsin’s government, a leader of the “party of war” on the Chechen issue and one of the most corrupt senior officials in the country. Anyone hired by Soskovets was automatically tainted in the eyes of liberals in Yeltsin’s campaign-the people who ultimately assumed control of the reelection drive. This is the first clue as to why none of the Russian principals knew or worked with the three “hired guns” (the Americans’ words, not mine).
Indeed, none of the actual leaders of the campaign — presidential advisers Viktor Ilyushin and Georgy Satarov, former deputy prime minister Anatoly Chubais, NTV television director Igor Malashenko, and Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko — has acknowledged the “heroic” work of the American specialists. Instead, in print and on the record, they have denounced the Americans and denied the exaggerated roles they claim to have played. Even Dyachenko, the Americans’ sole link to the campaign, refused to comment for Kramer’s scoop.
When she finally did speak on the record, she dismissed the trio, telling Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times that none of their work was ” central, either in terms of planning or strategy.” If these three guys really had saved the Yeltsin campaign, you would think at least one of their clients would be willing to put in a good word.
The reason no one has anything positive to say about their work, however, becomes obvious as one reads the accounts from Time and Nightline. First, the three claim that they taught the Russians to “go negative” against communism. This gem of American consulting wisdom is a no-brainer. In fact, had they any background in Russia’s electoral history, they would know that anti-communism has been the basic message of all of Yeltsin’s campaigns since 1989. Satarov (whom I’ve known for six years) and other key campaign figures were already talking about their antiCommunist strategy in January, weeks before the Americans’ “go negative” memo was drafted.
In fact, all of the Americans’ memos seemed to chase events, not make them. Their March memo urging Yeltsin to bash government officials responsible for not paying back wages was written two months after the bashing campaign began. Their May 5 memo urging Yeltsin to woo Gen. Alexander Lebed came weeks after the deal with Lebed was struck. Their memo after the first round urging an early election date came days after the issue was decided by the campaign managers.
The Americans also claimed that their initial task was “simple education, Campaigning 101,” implying that their colleagues knew nothing about campaign tactics. This comment is at best naive and at worst insulting. Dozens of people working on Yeltsin’s campaign had been through Campaigning 101 well before the American “teachers” ever set foot in Russia. Since 1990, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute have conducted hundreds of seminars, conferences, and exchanges on party organization, message development, focus groups, polling methods, television ads, and so on. Satarov’s own think tank translated into Russian the coveted Republican National Committee campaign handbook (mentioned by Nightline as an “election bible”) four years before these Americans arrived.
For a decade now, Russian leaders, activists, and citizens have been battling to bring democracy to Russia. Russia’s democrats are the heroes of this drama, not a handful of U.S. campaign operatives writing memos, for an audience of one, that were banal, obvious, or late.
Even so, the greatest outrage here is not the conduct of three consultants out to make a buck and reap publicity even if it meant breaking Russia’s law against foreigners’ working directly in campaigns. The real culprits are Michael Kramer, his editors, and the journalists at Nightline, who ignored the actual story and instead sensationalized a trivial sideshow. Nightline’s only sources and Kramer’s main ones are the Americans themselves. In a use of sources that would not pass my undergraduate seminar, Kramer cites bits of conversation between Yeltsin’s daughter and the Americans as told by the Americans. Did he ever think that his informants might have an agenda or a biased point of view? Why did neither Kramer nor Nightline quote key Russians? If an academic like me was able to conduct dozens of interviews with Yeltsin campaign officials, surely organizations such as Time and ABC could have verified their scoops with accounts from Russian witnesses.
But perhaps the truth was not the goal. Would Time have featured Anatoly Chubais, Giorgy Satarov, or the common Russian voter on its cover? Without images of “secret weapons” and American heroes, would this story have made Nightline? My guess is not, and that’s the tragedy. Instead of reporting the tremendous drama of Yeltsin’s victory as achieved by Russians, Kramer and Nightline chose to focus on marginal players only because they were American political operatives. Although the three failed to influence the Yeltsin campaign, they manipulated the U.S. media brilliantly.
During the Russian presidential elections, the Western press berated its Russian counterparts for uncritically reporting Boris Yeltsin’s campaign. The Western press should look at the unprofessionalism, bias, and just plain bad reporting in its own ranks.
Michael McFaul is assistant professor of political science at Stanford University and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
