Word: dresner
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...then the team went to work. A great deal of their communication with Dyachenko and Yeltsin's other aides was conducted by written memorandums. "Translation was a constant problem," says Dresner. "We spent a full day trying to convey what we meant by having Yeltsin stay 'on message.'" Minister Borodin says, "Having the memos let the President consider them calmly. We had many discussions about the recommendations and in the end adopted most everything the Americans advised...
...cursory reading of the Russian press quickly convinced the Americans that virtually the entire nation was furious about the salaries government workers had been owed for months on end. When Yeltsin's aides explained that the President had already promised to correct the back-pay problem, the droopy-eyed Dresner shook his head in disbelief. "You can't just promise these things," he told Dyachenko. "You have to do them. And then you have to make sure the people know what you've done...
...that Yeltsin would lose and lose badly if the election were a referendum on his stewardship. Most Russians, the polls and focus groups found, perceived Yeltsin as a friend who had betrayed them, a populist who had become imperial. "Stalin had higher positives and lower negatives than Yeltsin," says Dresner. "We actually tested the two in polls and focus groups. More than 60% of the electorate believed Yeltsin was corrupt; more than 65% believed he had wrecked the economy. We were in a deep, deep hole...
Science "won the day again," says Dresner. "We showed we'd been right from the start." From then on, the American team's influence grew--and anticommunism became the central and repeated focus of the campaign and the candidate...
...people felt some nostalgia for what the communists had done for Russia and no one liked the President--but they liked the possibility of riots and class warfare even less." "'Stick with Yeltsin and at least you'll have calm'--that was the line we wanted to convey," says Dresner. "So the drumbeat about unrest kept pounding right till the end of the run-off round, when the final TV spots were all about the Soviets' repressive rule...