He’s not finding any takers. Zyuganov, the former regional propaganda chief, is the hometown favorite in Oryol; he was born and raised just outside the region’s capital. But no less important, he has established himself as the candidate with the best chance of defeating Boris Yeltsin nationwide. Russians routinely blame Yeltsin for everything: low wages, crime, the unending civil war in Chechnya. The president has strong support in a few places like Moscow and St. Petersburg, where foreign investors and local businessmen are proving the advantages of market economics. But he will need all the resources he can muster to stop Zyuganov’s challenge in the Russian heartland, where many voters–rightly or not–believe they were better off before communism collapsed. “The difference between Washington and the rest of the United States is much smaller than the difference between Moscow and the rest of Russia,” says Eduard Dorofeyev, the political editor of the Oryol region’s largest daily newspaper, Orlovskaya Pravda. “For us in the provinces, Moscow is a different world.”
Yeltsin has set out to conquer both worlds. His aides have revved up the country’s official propaganda apparatus, which still holds considerable clout. Every presidential appearance is trumpeted on state television, while Yeltsin’s 10 opponents get only fleeting coverage. Everywhere he goes–even in Beijing last week–the president hammers away at his campaign’s main theme: that a victory for the communists would mean disaster. “If they win, civil war would start in Russia,” he warned an audience of Chinese communist officials, who listened in stunned silence. “This would be an end to reforms. This cannot be allowed.”
Even in communist bastions like Oryol the Yeltsin campaign is refusing to quit without a fight. NEWSWEEK has obtained a letter from Yeltsin’s chief of staff, Nikolai Yegorov, to local news services in Oryol. The March 21 letter advises that Yeltsin’s staff is sending e-mail reports on presidential doings “for obligatory publication in the local state press [and] broadcasting by local radio and television companies.” And Oryol residents checking their mailboxes have begun finding pamphlets headlined GOD FORBID! The tracts, in newspaper format, warn of dire consequences if the communists return to power in Russia. “At first your brother-in-law will be put in jail because he bought a couple of hun-dred dollars for a rainy day,” the anonymous author warns. “Then his friend who owns a kiosk [will be imprisoned] as a “profiteer’.” Before long, “there will be tanks on the streets.”
Will such scare tactics about the future work? Many Russians think the present is bad enough. Their sons are fighting and dying in Chechnya, where a 16-month-old civil war continues despite the reported death last week of the rebels’ leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev. Back home in much of the Russian heartland, private enterprise has brought barely an echo of Moscow’s economic bustle. The city of Oryol, with a population of 350,000, has just one privately owned restaurant and a smattering of private stores. Few people in the region think they have benefited personally from the government’s economic-reform programs. Instead, people here tend to associate the term “reforms” with the unraveling of their society–declining living standards, wages that arrive months late, blatant official corruption and even more blatant organized crime.
The prospects are equally dismal 25 miles outside Oryol city in Zyuganov’s birthplace, the village of Mymrino. The brown wooden house where the candidate’s family used to live is now occupied by Galina Solodukhina, a postal clerk. Her husband is unemployed, so the family of five lives on her $35-a-month salary, along with whatever food they can raise on their small plot of land. The couple’s oldest son is about to be drafted, and they’re afraid he’ll be sent to Chechnya. They can’t afford to replace the house’s leaky roof. “In Moscow they get millions,” says Solodukhina. “Here, we get nothing.” She dreams of moving to an apartment with indoor plumbing. She’s for Zyuganov: “If he wins, maybe we’ll have money again.”
It’s an article of faith among Zyuganov’s supporters that the communists will make Russia prosperous again. The candidate himself makes little effort to dispel such notions. He allows that previous communist leaders made “mistakes,” and he vaguely promises to avoid such errors while continuing “reasonable” reforms. But he praises Lenin as “the greatest person on the planet,” and he complains about “massive anti-state and anti-Stalinist brainwashing” in response to questions about the millions who died during Stalin’s rule. “They arrested two people” in Mymrino during the terror of the 1930s, he told one interviewer, “and both were criminals.”
In reality, thousands were executed in the region, including roughly 2,000 Orthodox priests. The Oryol rehabilitation committee, established in 1992, has so far cleared the names of 17,000 local victims of Stalinist persecution, almost all of them posthumously. But even its members staunchly defend Zyuganov. “It’s a lie to say that Zyuganov will create new gulags,” says committee chairman Aleksei Alyoshin. “There won’t be anything like that.” Zyuganov’s most fervent supporters claim the campaign against him is funded by “the International Monetary Fund and Bill Clinton,” invoking the kind of conspiracy theories that were rampant in the Soviet era.
Such wild rhetoric scares other voters, even a few in Oryol. “We don’t like Yeltsin, but we’ll vote for him so the Reds won’t come back,” says Nikolai Prestyasov, 25, a lab technician. “If Zyuganov wins, we’ll have the same nonsense we had for 70 years.” Nina Rshtunch, 58, runs a general store in small town of Znamenskoye. She’s busy sprucing the place up with a bright new paint job that would have been inconceivable in the old days. “I’ll vote for anyone but the communists,” she says. “I don’t want to stand in line for sausage and butter again.” Similar arguments can be heard across the country. As the election draws near, Yeltsin will have to win many of them if he’s going to have a chance to win a second term.
