The aging president is unsure whether he should run for a second term; his approval ratings are low and his health is a concern. His advisers assert that he is their only bulwark against a formidable foe, and argue that his candidacy is essential to democracy's survival. If he does not run, they say, dictatorship will prevail. The president reluctantly agrees. He vows to defeat his opponents and secure the country's future.
This is not today's America, but Russia in 1996. The old president is not Joe Biden but Boris Yeltsin. His formidable rival is not Donald Trump but Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. As I watch the US presidential campaign unfold, I am constantly reminded of their battle. Despite the many differences between them, I cannot shake the feeling of déjà vu.
In the 90s, Russia seemed to be at a crossroads, facing a clear choice between democracy and dictatorship. Today, it is clear that this was a false dichotomy. Instead, a disingenuous campaign based on fear not only undermined Russians' faith in democracy, but also unintentionally encouraged the rise of a future dictator, Vladimir Putin. That's a pretty scary story.
At the end of 1995, Boris Yeltsin's popularity was disastrously low, at around 6%. But his advisers were bullish. They saw Yeltsin, who had ignored other, more popular Democratic candidates, Viktor Chernomyrdin and the young Boris Nemtsov, and had won the Communist elections in 1991, as the only person who could save the country from a return of Communism. The country's young democracy was at risk. Though initially reluctant, Yeltsin was eventually convinced.
There was certainly reason to worry. Amid growing discontent across the country, Zyuganov was running a campaign that could be summed up with a familiar slogan: “Make Russia Great Again.” By the end of 1995, his party had won the parliamentary elections, effectively securing control of the Duma. In early 1996, he attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, cementing his position as Russia's next presidential candidate, a victory that many thought was all but certain.
But Yeltsin's advisers weren't going to give up that easily. They began to run a surprisingly effective election campaign, following what they called “the formula of fear.” One of the campaign directors, Sergei Zverev, explained their thinking to me when I was writing my book on Russia's 1990s. “It was essential to use all tactics to instill fear about the future among the population,” he told me, “so that the fear of what might happen if someone other than Yeltsin won would overshadow the existing dissatisfaction with his personality.”
Russia's media, which once enjoyed considerable freedom, became an extension of the president's propaganda machine. Major TV stations and newspapers not only supported Yeltsin but also vilified Zyuganov, painting a dire scenario of Communist victory that included a return of the Soviet Union, mass arrests, widespread repression and the imposition of strict censorship.
Without media scrutiny, the president's reelection campaign was opaque. On the surface, big business made voluntary donations to prevent the Communist Party's victory. But the reality was quite different. Huge amounts of state funds flowed to businessmen close to the regime, who diverted some of it for personal use and used the rest for the election campaign. A few years ago, several oligarchs frankly admitted to me that they had profited from the election campaign, revealing the depths of the corruption that underpins it.
By the spring of 1996, Yeltsin's reelection effort was in full swing. He was in poor health; he had suffered multiple heart attacks and there were numerous reports that he frequently consumed alcohol to excess, which his family consistently denied. But despite his health problems, Yeltsin traveled extensively throughout Russia, spoke energetically at numerous rallies, and danced onstage to dispel concerns about his health. Meanwhile, the media continued to report on him.
Despite initial concerns about the president's performance, Yeltsin narrowly won the first round of the June election, beating his Communist opponent by just 3 percentage points. But just days before the runoff election, tragedy struck: Yeltsin suffered another heart attack. Shocked, his campaign made a decision: to hide the seriousness of the president's health from the public. He would no longer appear live, and television stations aired old footage of him instead.
Yeltsin won the second round of the election, but it's unclear whether he was capable of governing. His inaugural speech was surprisingly short, just 44 seconds, and many of the key decisions that followed were reportedly made by his family, not him. Vladimir Potanin, a prominent Russian oligarch who served as first deputy prime minister in the late 1990s, once described the situation at the time to me in stark terms: “Nobody was running the country.”
In 1999, while Yeltsin was still recovering from his final heart attack, his aides engineered his early resignation. They looked for someone easier to work with, and appointed the head of the FSB as his successor. Putin would go on to embody the gloomy predictions made by the media in 1996. He began efforts to restore aspects of the Soviet Union, implemented censorship and launched a wave of crackdowns. In retrospect, the level of authoritarianism seems, at its worst, to have far exceeded what Zyuganov had imagined.
Amazingly, many of the architects of the 1996 elections still believe that their actions were legitimate. Anatoly Chubais, head of the presidential administration in 1996 and 1997, told me that these elections were crucial to safeguarding Russian democracy. He even argued that they paved the way for what he called “the Russian economic miracle of the 2000s.”
There are other opinions. Alexei Navalny, for example, argued that the 1996 elections severely undermined Russians' confidence in the principles of free speech and fair elections. While imprisoned in 2022, he wrote “My Fear and Loathing,” in which he expressed contempt for those who he believed had shattered Russia's democratic prospects in the 1990s. “I despise those who sold, squandered and wasted the historic opportunity our country had in the early 1990s,” he wrote. “I hate those whom we mistakenly called reformers.”
Many Americans may find the comparison between the 1996 Russian election and the current US presidential election a bit of a stretch. Indeed, there are many differences: Biden is a very different leader than Yeltsin, who was clearly a heavy drinker; the US electoral system is much more transparent, campaign finance is regulated by law; and the media, far from being an organ of state propaganda, is free and clearly polarized; moreover, US democracy is still in its infancy.
But Yeltsin's campaign is instructive. Not only does it highlight the need for candidates to offer voters more than protection from worse, it also reveals the risk of claiming that only one man can save democracy. The formula of fear, no matter how well-founded, is a losing one. When fear leads voters to vote No rather than Yes, it erodes confidence in institutions. And confidence in democratic institutions is hard to restore once lost.
Russia's tragedy did not all happen in 1996. Rather, it was the year that laid the foundation for Putin's eventual dictatorship by eroding public trust and fostering widespread skepticism among the population. In America today, we often hear that the fate of democracy hinges on upcoming elections. I agree. But as the Russian experience shows, it's not as simple as just defeating the bad guys.
