Word: yeltsin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Over the past few months, the Russian and Western press have identified six different people as Yeltsin's campaign manager. In fact, the person really in charge was Yeltsin's daughter Tatiana Dyachenko, 36, a computer engineer with no previous political experience. While those in the campaign's upper reaches have always known that Dyachenko was the key cog in the apparatus--if only because she alone saw the man she routinely calls "Papa" on a daily basis--her role has been widely misunderstood. After dodging the media for months, Dyachenko last week described her job to the Russian press...
...history of "Tatiana's emergence is really quite simple," explains Valentin Yumachev, Yeltsin's close friend and ghostwriter. "The President decided in February that the campaign Soskovets was running was going nowhere. He needed someone he could trust completely, and she was it." None of Yeltsin's other senior campaign officials was "what you would call pleased with Tatiana's placement," adds Pavel Borodin, Yeltsin's Minister of the Presidency, the government's general-services manager. "But because she had no personal agenda they couldn't plot against her. Her power obviously derived from that, but also from her native...
...invitation only. A fence surrounds the property, which is patrolled by police armed with machine guns and wearing bulletproof vests. When Dyachenko moved her own office to the hotel to be near the Americans, the rest of the campaign took three floors of offices there as well. Yeltsin's badly split Russian advisers quickly set up separate fiefdoms on the eighth, ninth and 10th floors. Dyachenko worked almost exclusively on the 11th in Room 1119, directly across the hall from the Americans in 1120. She and they shared two secretaries, a translator, and fax, copying and computer-printing machines...
...team's office resembled a typical American campaign headquarters. Soda bottles and old food shared space with computer printouts. Graphs charting Yeltsin's progress in the polls hung on the walls, and the entire scene was dominated by a color-coded map of Russia with Post-it notes describing the vote expected in the nation's various regions. A safe stood unused, and documents intended for a shredder remained intact, in plain view...
...Yeltsin's staff brought a set of potentially disastrous biases to the campaign. They thought the polls they read in the papers were good enough to determine strategy, and because so many of their allies had failed miserably in the Duma elections despite spending huge sums on television commercials, they believed political advertising was useless in Russia...