Meanwhile, my supporters were collecting signatures in support of my nomination. The one million signatures were collected quickly and, on 21 March with the number of signatures exceeding 1.5 million, I announced, after long, serious consideration and hesitation, that I was joining the presidential race. In my announcement, I presented Russia’s rulers with a lengthy invoice for their failures:
You have allowed a small section of the population to misappropriate vast riches, while depriving the majority of an anchor in life and even of a meaningful existence.
You say you have filled the shelves with food and goods, but they are completely beyond the reach of tens of millions of people.
With your reckless policies, you have not only failed to provide a means of overcoming the economic crisis, but have doomed Russia’s industry to stagnate and die.
You have created an unprecedented situation where, for months, people are not paid what they have earned, while meagre pensions and education grants for the most vulnerable sections of the population condemn them to poverty. Not a word of explanation has been forthcoming from the top of the government about how or why this has happened.
You have abandoned to their fate science, culture and education, forcing teachers, doctors and scientists to go on strike.
You have turned the country into a training ground for, and hotbed of, unheard-of criminality, from which ordinary people have nowhere to seek redress.
You have unleashed a war in Chechnya for no reason the soldiers can discern, causing casualties for no reason mothers and families can understand. One can only speculate why a war the whole country condemns is now in its second year.
You have not even begun to reform the army, undermining the morale of the troops, reducing their combat readiness and eroding society’s respect for them.
You have thrown to the winds the legacy of goodwill generated by the foreign policy of the Perestroika period. Your foreign policy is baffling both to our own people and the outside world. It has reduced the country’s international prestige and security and does little to promote the economic and political interests of Russia.
You never acknowledge what is obvious to everybody: that the troubles and adversity that have befallen millions of people are the outcome of bungled policies that discredit the concepts of ‘reform’, ‘the market’, ‘democracy’ and ‘respect for the government’.
For these reasons, I state my total disagreement with the policies pursued by the present government and insist they must change. I have the right to put the matter in these terms because I am aware of the degree of my own moral responsibility, not only for what was initiated 10 years ago on my initiative and of my own volition, but also for what has happened and been done in recent years without my involvement and contrary to my intentions.
I said I was making no secret of my aims and intentions:
It is my profound conviction that, both from a political and a moral standpoint, the present regime does not deserve to survive. Using free elections and democratic procedures, it needs to be removed and replaced by a government for which the good of the people, freedom and social justice are the top priorities, and how far those are respected is the primary indication and confirmation that a government is truly democratic.
In my manifesto, which will shortly be put forward for discussion by voters, I start from the premise that reform should be for the benefit of everybody and not just one section of society; that the prosperity and well-being of each individual and family should depend on how hard they work, the extent of their initiative and business acumen rather than their adroitness in grabbing anything that does not belong to them but is not nailed down.
We need to provide the most favourable conditions possible for entrepreneurs, particularly the owners of small and medium-sized businesses, to enable them to expand their operations; we need to empower the professionals in culture, science and education to maintain and develop society’s spiritual potential. The urge to make Russia a rich, prosperous and democratic country is what can and should unite us all.
I publicly declare that I am entering the electoral contest as an independent, ‘non-party’ candidate, free of all group interests and obligations. I do not have a party of my own and have no intention of creating one. I am prepared to work together with anybody who will put the national interests and future of Russia ahead of partisanship and personal ambition. My ‘party’ is all of Russia and all Russians, regardless of whether they vote for or against me. My priority is to unite a Russia beset by rifts and rebellions and to do everything in my power to enable her to stride confidently into the twenty-first century.
The Central Electoral Commission registered me as a candidate for the presidency of Russia on 13 April. Many people, including friends and those closest to me, tried to dissuade me from joining the race but, once I had decided to do so, I was very conscious of their moral support. Raisa, who was not only doubtful but anxious (as it turned out, with good reason), was with me from beginning to end of the saga. She did not find the psychological burden easy to bear, particularly because the campaign immediately turned into a contest without rules.
Even before the presidential campaign got under way, violations of electoral law by the Presidential Administration and the other departments of the executive branch become increasingly blatant. The government would stop at nothing, and had the benefit of lavish funding for their own campaign.
Yeltsin’s election teams launched a high-cost, large-scale agitation and propaganda campaign with bands, singers and dancers and all the other razzmatazz, complete with catchy slogans previously honed on American voters: ‘Choose or Lose’, ‘Vote with Your Heart!’.
During the campaign, the fees payable to pop stars for concerts went through the roof. My assistant invited a celebrated music group under the direction of a musician I knew well to perform at one of my campaign meetings in Moscow, but the fee he named, considering it honest-to-God ‘mates’ rates’, was well beyond our means.
Then there were the vote-catching promises designed to draw electors to Yeltsin, despite the fact that the backlog of wages, pensions and welfare payments ran into billions of roubles. At the same time, orders were issued by officials in Moscow to local government workers. This was the remit of a team staffed by government officials and representatives of the intelligence services.
Ginger groups proliferated, as did teams, committees and movements, all designed to demonstrate ‘universal popular support’, all vying to outdo one another. In contravention of electoral law, a council was set up chaired by the incumbent president to coordinate the activities of the teams and associations to re-elect him. It included all the top government officials, from the prime minister to the director of the Federal Security Bureau. They co-opted the head of NTV, the only independent television station, which meant they had total control of television. The election was turned into a football match with one goal, trampling underfoot all moral and legal standards on the principle that the end justifies the means. The only force capable of effectively opposing this aggressive, lawless juggernaut would have been a joint effort by all the opposition’s democratic presidential candidates, but they proved to be disunited, unwilling and incapable of cooperating or compromising with each other. That fatal weakness was expertly exploited by the government.
Breaking through the conspiracy of silence