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| RUSSIAN ELECTIONS | |
 December 17, 1999  |
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On Sunday, Russians headed to the polls to elect a new parliament. The top issue: the Russian army's campaign in Chechnya. NewsHour special correspondent Simon Marks reports. EDITOR'S NOTE: Election results indicate significant gains for the party endorsed by the Prime Minister and other reform parties who will now hold more than 50 percent of the Duma.
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| Apartment bombings galvanize support | ||||||||||||||||||||
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But unlike the last war, which bitterly divided the country, and for the moment at least, this time Russian soldiers are fated as heroes. The military campaign is a lightning rod, galvanizing the country and drawing almost universal support. Even Wednesday night's clash in the Chechen capital Grozny, which reportedly left more than 115 Russian soldiers dead, has at least not yet noticeably diminished support for the war. The reasons lie buried here, where an apartment building once stood in a southern Moscow suburb, stood until a mysterious explosion rips through the building just before midnight on September 8, killing 94 residents. Antonia Safrygina was one of the few survivors.
SIMON MARKS: The bombing was one in a series that killed more than 300 Russians in cities nationwide, most of them asleep in their beds when the blasts occurred. The Russian government blamed Chechen terrorists for the bombing campaign. Residents of Moscow from all over Russia's southern outposts were quickly rounded up and taken in for questioning. Their civil rights were simply ignored in the apparent rush to find those responsible. Three months on, no one has been charged with any of the bombings. And in a rare display of Russian efficiency, the bombing sites were razed to the ground, even before the bodies of all the victims were recovered. Some of the survivors now have sneaking doubts about who may have planted the explosives. |
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| Identity of bombers questioned | ||||||||||||||||||||
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ANTONIA SAFRYGINA: (speaking through interpreter) I don't know. Who could possibly know. Nobody saw anything. Someone said they heard something, someone said they saw something suspicious, but there is no proof. How can I blame someone if I don't know for sure? Russians? Chechens? I can't tell. SIMON MARKS: The notion that the Russian government may somehow have been involved in the bombings is slowly gathering adherence in Moscow.
SIMON MARKS: The Carnegie Endowment Lilia Shevtsova is one of Russia's leading political analysts, and one of those who suspects the apartment bombs were planted on Russian government orders to create a pretext for waging war in Chechnya. LILIA SHEVTSOVA: I don't think that the Chechen separatists benefited a lot from the blasts. In that, they lost nearly everything. They are losing Chechnya. They are losing possibility to rule in Chechnya. And pretty soon, I think they will be finished. So they lost everything, and who benefited from it? The Kremlin family.
GRIGORY YAVLINSKY: I think that the people sooner or later will understand what's going on in Russia. The people would understand that it's absolutely unacceptable simply to kill people to make the war and to smash everything on the earth. It would be a real crime if the Russian military would smash Grozny with the different ultimatums or things like that. I would never accept that, and whether my voters would support it today or not, I'm sure that sooner or later, they would understand me.
VLADIMIR PUTIN: (speaking through interpreter) For too long we were forced to be second-rate people in our own home. We always tried to negotiate with the bandits, but they talked to us in the language of criminals, sometimes covering things up with their religious slogans. Today we must move quickly, decisively, and smash the beast at its roots. If we don't do it today, things will be much worse tomorrow. |
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| Kremlin, allies attack Yeltsin's opponents | ||||||||||||||||||||
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SIMON MARKS: The effects of the media campaign have been devastating, especially for Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. Four months ago he was riding high in the polls, tipped by many to be Russia's next president. Now, stung by the force of the campaign against him, the once all-powerful mayor told the NewsHour that Russia's election campaign is neither free nor fair.
SIMON MARKS: Former Prime Minister Primakov, too, is now in open warfare against his former boss, Boris Yeltsin. At 70, he's survived successive Soviet and Russian regimes. For the first time, he finds himself out in the cold. YEVGENY PRIMAKOV: (speaking through interpreter) It's a dirty campaign. You can see that through the media war, the slander, the lies which have been told about us. Think about why this is happening, why they are not touching anyone else. It's because they're afraid of us. |
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| The rise of the Unity party | ||||||||||||||||||||
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SIMON MARKS: Chaos that for the moment serves the political ambitions of the Kremlin as Boris Yeltsin tries to chart a succession that will protect him and his family from investigations into corruption. But there is no guarantee that the war in Chechnya will remain popular, especially if Russian soldiers continue to lose their lives -- no guarantee that the president's opponents are down and out for good, and no guarantee that the apartment bombing, that initially helped spark the Kremlin's reversal of the fortunes, will remain a mystery forever. |
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SIMON
MARKS: It is the war that has completely, suddenly, and dramatically
altered the course of Russian politics. Three years after a negotiated
settlement seemed to usher in an era of fragile peace in the breakaway
region of Chechnya, Chechen rebels find themselves once again pitted
against the might of the Russian army.
ANTONIA
SAFRYGINA: (speaking through interpreter) You can't forget that night.
I was asleep when the explosion lifted me up. I sat down on the sofa.
Everything was cracking all around me. I couldn't understand what was
going on. The windows were all shattered and there was thick black smoke
everywhere. People were screaming for help. 
LILIA
SHEVTSOVA, The Carnegie Endowment: There is no real evidence that the
Chechen terrorists did it. And we know only who benefited from those
explosions, who benefited from this tragedy. 
SIMON
MARKS: Headed by Russian President Boris Yeltsin, the Kremlin family
of loyalists is once again the dominant force in Russian politics. The
war in Chechnya has proved so popular, that the president's opponents
have been forced either to pledge their support for the military campaign
or face the consequences in Sunday's parliament elections. (Speaking
Russian) Liberal opposition leader Gregory Grigory Yavlinsky has been
branded a traitor by Yeltsin loyalists for suggesting that negotiations
are preferable to war. Privately he has is said to fear that his party
may not win the 5 percent of votes needed this Sunday to secure seats
in the Duma, the lower house of Russia's parliament. 
SIMON
MARKS: And while the war has forced the Kremlin's opponents on the defensive,
it has helped new faces rise in Russian politics. Prime Minister Vladimir
Putin, unknown just a few weeks ago, is now considered a front-runner
in the race to succeed President Yeltsin next year…his popularity
built on the tough-guy image he's projected throughout the military
campaign. 
SIMON
MARKS: It isn't only the war in Chechnya that has helped the Kremlin
neutralize the parliamentary ambitions of Boris Yeltsin's key opponents.
Battle has been waged on a second front as well: On Russia's airwaves,
which have crackled to the sounds of old-style propaganda. And in the
propaganda wars, Russian television's Sergei Dorenko is the mudslinger
in chief. Every Sunday night, his program broadcast across 11 time zones,
is an untrammeled diatribe against President Yeltsin's major opponents.
There is no attempt at balance and no right of reply. His two main targets:
Former Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, and the mayor of Moscow,
Yuri Luzhkov. They've joined forces in Russia's parliamentary election
campaign, the two veterans of the political struggle here, leading the
fatherland, all-Russia coalition. In one recent broadcast alone, Dorenko
accused Primakov of plotting to assassinate a foreign head of state,
of traveling to Germany to have private medical treatment he could have
received at home, and of using his contacts overseas to weaken Russian
power during the war in Kosovo. Luzhkov meantime, was accused of conspiring
to murder an American businessman, and even of involvement with the
Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo Anchor man Dorenko is unrepentant
about his role in the Kremlin-ordered destruction of Primakov and Luzhkov's
credibility. 
SERGEI
DORENKO: (speaking through interpreter) News is just news. Period. When
a man kills, steals or commits other violations, we say here are the
facts and here's the proof. People say it's a dirty campaign, but I
say why don't they read the Ten Commandments? If they'd read and remembered
the words, thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not steal, the campaign
would be clean. A clean campaign is a campaign where the participants
are clean. 
MAYOR
YURI LUZHKOV: (speaking through interpreter) There is no democracy here
in Russia. Everybody says that President Yeltsin's main achievement,
even though we failed in the economic field and there is corruption
here, everyone says that at least we have freedom. Well, I can tell
you that this is not freedom. This is the tyranny of power, and it seems
to me that soon I doubt that anyone will be able to discuss the country's
problems with you openly and freely. 
SIMON
MARKS: Afraid that Luzhkov and Primakov's party might dominate the new
parliament and serve as a base for an unbeatable presidential election
campaign next year. Now, Sunday's parliamentary vote seems likely to
usher in a very different scenario. Polls show that a new party, Unity,
led by the charismatic emergency situations Minister Sergei Shoigu,
could emerge as the surprise winner of the election. An entirely untested
force in Russian politics, the youthful 45-year-old has spent most of
the past few weeks in Chechnya, gaining votes by offering to mediate
without giving in to the separatists. His hastily produced advertising
campaign supported by the Kremlin, seizes on national symbols, like
the Russian bear, and promises that voters better times lie ahead. Polls
also show the Communists led by Gennady Zyuganov will perform well on
Sunday. Their supporters are nostalgic for the past and remain loyal
to the Communist message, guaranteeing Zyuganov up to 25 percent of
the vote. But they are unlikely to attract new support, and the Kremlin
has barely bothered to attack them, even appearing happy to have the
Communists around as a predictable, relatively unthreatening opposition.
LILIA
SHEVTOSVA: It's not that important how many people, each faction, each
political force, will have in the parliament in the end. Much more important
is that the Kremlin's struggle against everybody, the dirty-trick campaign,
liquidated the field for the centrist, moderate, and honest politics.
At least until recently we had some principles. We some rules of the
game -- of course, not very satisfying rules, of the game -- but at
least major political forces were following the rules of the game. Now
everything has been demolished. We have, you know, the absolute chaos
on the political scene. 
