1996 Russian Presidential Election

The 1996 Russian Presidential Election was fought over more than the presidency: it tested whether the public’s anger at the upheavals of the post-Soviet years would bring the Communists back to power, and whether the new oligarchs could turn their wealth into political influence. Boris Yeltsin won a runoff described as largely rigged, but the campaign exposed the collision of economic collapse, media power, historical memory, and Eduard Limonov’s deliberately paradoxical politics.

Crisis and the Communist challenge

The election approached after the shock therapy reforms and first privatizations had plunged Russia into chaos. For many people, the years since 1989 seemed a historic calamity, and Yeltsin—once the focus of high hopes—appeared to have lost control. He was secluded in the Kremlin with his family and security chief, Alexander Korzhakov, and coped with severe black moods by drinking heavily. His public drunkenness, including an embarrassing appearance at Berlin’s solemn commemoration of the 1945 victory, further weakened his standing. The account also links the prospect of a new war in Chechnya to the political calculations of military hardliners: a conflict, they hoped, might damage the nationalists and revive Yeltsin’s popularity, while concealing corruption in the military command.

The alternative that alarmed the establishment was not merely a protest candidate but the Communist Party. Five years earlier, Yeltsin had declared it illegal; now polls suggested that voters angered by democracy, the market, and the injustice accompanying them were ready to support it in large numbers. Its leader, Gennady Zyuganov, presented a cautious program centered on fighting corruption, restoring national pride, and affirming Russian Orthodoxy. Rather than promising a return to the Gulag or the Berlin Wall, he pledged to narrow the gap between rich and poor. That offer drew force from the hardships of ordinary people, even as its label carried the weight of the Soviet past.

Oligarchs, privatization, and the campaign

The oligarchs had reason to fear a change of government. The earlier voucher privatization scheme had been badly undermined by inflation: after prices were liberalized, inflation reached 2,600 percent, and the vouchers mailed on September 1, 1992, to Russian citizens over one year old were nearly worthless by the time they arrived. Some recipients could exchange a voucher for little more than a bottle of vodka. The account identifies Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky among the businessmen who bought up vouchers and became multibillionaires within months, in a country where rules, banking, and taxation had yet to catch up with private business.

Their immediate stake was the loans-for-shares scheme. Banks lent money to the cash-strapped state, taking shares in valuable, still-unprivatized industries such as natural gas and petroleum as collateral. If the state failed to repay the loans after a year, the lenders could take the shares; the deadline fell after the election. A Communist victory might undo the arrangement. After a warning from George Soros at the Davos World Economic Forum made the danger feel immediate, Berezovsky called six other powerful oligarchs and urged them to unite behind Yeltsin. Their rivalries, including violent competition between the entourages of Berezovsky and Gusinsky, gave way temporarily to a common electoral purpose.

The seven oligarchs poured money and media influence into Yeltsin’s campaign. Newspapers, radio, and television repeatedly framed the choice as either Yeltsin or chaos, or a leap backward. Relentless broadcasts of documentaries about the Gulag, Stalin’s famine in Ukraine, and the Katyn Massacre reinforced the warning against a Communist return. The campaign thus made historical memory part of electoral persuasion: the suffering of the Soviet past was used to discredit the alternative, while the disastrous consequences of the new economic order helped make that alternative attractive.

Limonov and the choice between camps

The campaign left Limonov’s young National Bolsheviks with a political dilemma. They were disgusted by propaganda that rejected what they had been taught to love and placed their parents’ ideals alongside Nazism. Yet Limonov found neither Yeltsin nor Zyuganov a satisfactory choice. He briefly joined the marginal Stalin Bloc, only to be displaced as its candidate by Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, Stalin’s grandson, whose mustache and pipe recalled the dictator. In the runoff, however, Limonov told his followers to vote for Yeltsin. His reasoning was that the more chaos there was, the better the prospects for revolution.

The decision startled supporters and later fed rumors that Limonov was a paid Kremlin agent. He drew a different lesson: political paradoxes were dangerous because the masses would not understand them. The episode captures the gap between his revolutionary ambitions and the practical effect of his interventions. Rather than offering a stable electoral program, he treated the ballot as one move in a larger contest over disorder and political possibility.

Victory and the violence that followed

Between the two rounds, Yeltsin suffered a heart attack, which was concealed from the public as far as possible. The runoff ultimately declared him the winner, in an outcome the narrative calls largely rigged. His victory secured the oligarchs’ immediate political objective and left Limonov convinced that the election’s aftermath, rather than its formal result, might open further possibilities for upheaval.

Soon after the election, Limonov was walking home alone when three men attacked him on a deserted street. They knocked him down and kicked his ribs and face. He spent eight days in hospital and nearly lost an eye. The account does not establish who ordered the assault. Limonov’s suspicions focused particularly on General Alexander Lebed, who had finished third in the election, but the possibility that Lebed or someone around him had retaliated for attacks in Limonka remains a suspicion, not a demonstrated explanation. Afterwards, Limonov no longer went out without three tough-looking National Bolsheviks beside him. The election’s conclusion, in this account, is therefore not simply Yeltsin’s victory: it is the visible continuation of political competition through money, propaganda, unresolved suspicion, and personal violence.