Word: yeltsin
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With back pay identified as among the most irksome issues, the team advised that Yeltsin haul officials on the carpet for failing to distribute the cash as he'd directed. The President embraced that suggestion with relish, and the press eagerly reported the boss's taking his subordinates to task...
Clever as they may have been, that and similar tactical strokes were small beer. Yeltsin's problems were too big to be solved simply by delivering what people knew was due them in the first place. Even before their polling confirmed their suspicions, the Americans intuited 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...
...team's early memos, a 10-page document dated March 2, the Americans summed up the situation: "Voters don't approve of the job Yeltsin is doing, don't think things will ever get any better and prefer the Communists' approach. There exists only one very simple strategy for winning: first, becoming the only alternative to the Communists; and second, making the people see that the Communists must be stopped at all costs...
...hindsight, the need for an anticommunist emphasis by the Yeltsin campaign--the need to "go negative"--seems self-evident. But when the Americans first harped on anticommunism as the "only" route to victory, many in the campaign resisted. And despite their status and patronage, the Americans had to fight long and hard before that core strategy was accepted. As Dyachenko told the team after reading the memo, "We have many factions and each has its own view, but most everyone agrees that with communism coming back all over Eastern Europe and with Stalin's reputation rising here, a campaign based...
...argument over the campaign's central message raged all through March. Matters finally came to a head in early April as Yeltsin prepared to give a speech unveiling his campaign program. That address was expected to signal the campaign's substance and tone, and it became a major battleground for control of the campaign. In a nine-point memo dated April 2 that covered content, theme and staging, the team wrote that the "overall goal of the kickoff speech [should be] to demonstrate to the average Russian that Yeltsin understands the suffering the country has been going through...The President...