Berezovsky helping Yeltsin win the 1996 election

Boris Berezovsky’s role in Boris Yeltsin’s 1996 re-election is presented as a decisive conversion of private wealth into political power. Alarmed that the Communists might win, Berezovsky brought rival oligarchs together, and they used their financial and media resources to make Yeltsin’s victory the condition for protecting their newly acquired fortunes. The campaign helped keep Yeltsin in power; in Berezovsky’s telling afterward, the president’s political survival had made him the man who held power in Russia.

Wealth Before the Campaign

The relationship took shape amid economic reforms that remade the distribution of Russian wealth. Yeltsin’s government liberalized prices, producing inflation of 2,600 percent. A voucher privatization program was meant to give citizens a share in national property: on September 1, 1992, vouchers worth 10,000 rubles were mailed to every Russian citizen over one year old. But inflation had already stripped them of practical value. Many recipients sold them for little more than the price of a bottle of vodka, allowing well-positioned buyers to accumulate claims on privatized businesses.

Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky were among the businessmen who became multibillionaires within months. The account emphasizes the speed and uncertainty of the transformation: people previously barred from business were suddenly told to pursue it in a country without established rules, laws, a banking system, or taxation. That new wealth was not simply an economic backdrop to the election. It gave the oligarchs the means to intervene directly in the political contest.

A Common Threat and a Common Plan

The immediate danger, as Berezovsky and his associates saw it, was a Communist victory. The party’s leader, Gennady Zyuganov, campaigned on opposition to corruption and the inequality of the new order, rather than on a promise to restore the Gulag or the Berlin Wall. His moderate presentation attracted attention even among powerful international observers. At the 1995 Davos World Economic Forum, journalists and advisers gathered around him as though he might become Russia’s next ruler. George Soros warned Berezovsky that the oligarchs could face difficult times, even exile to Siberia, if Zyuganov prevailed.

Berezovsky responded by calling the six most powerful oligarchs. Their divisions were substantial: he and Gusinsky were bitter rivals, and their hired forces were killing one another. For the election, Berezovsky urged them to set those conflicts aside and join forces to get Yeltsin re-elected. The seven men pooled their financial and media influence behind the incumbent. Their alliance was therefore practical rather than harmonious: they did not need to settle their rivalries, only to recognize that a change of government might threaten their shared interests.

The Media Campaign

The oligarchs’ media influence meant access to the country’s newspapers, radio stations, and television channels. Across these outlets, the campaign repeated a stark choice: Yeltsin or chaos, Yeltsin or a great leap backward. The message did not rely only on advocacy for the incumbent. To discourage nostalgia for Communist rule, broadcasters showed frightening documentaries about the Gulag, the famine organized under Stalin in Ukraine, and the Katyn Massacre. Fiction films about the purges were also commissioned, including Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun.

The campaign made control of communication part of the political contest itself. Its force lay in presenting the election not as a choice between rival programs alone, but as a choice between Yeltsin and the return of a traumatic past. The account notes the irony of this anti-Stalinist appeal: it could be delivered through a film made in a Stalinist style, while Yeltsin’s opponents had little comparable access to the media being used to shape public attention.

Political Debt and Its Limits

After the campaign, Berezovsky was conspicuous about what he believed he had accomplished. He reminded others that, when speaking of power in Russia, they were speaking of him, and that Yeltsin owed him for being allowed to keep his throne. The opposition was described as shattered and the public as politically inert; in that setting, Berezovsky’s boast captures the imbalance between an elected president and the private interests that had helped preserve his position.

The account characterizes the wider result as the privatization of politics. The loans-for-shares arrangement gave oligarchs a route from lending to the state to acquiring shares in valuable, not-yet-privatized sectors such as natural gas and petroleum if the loans were not repaid. The election mattered to them because a successor might repudiate the arrangement; Yeltsin’s re-election protected the political conditions under which they expected to claim those assets. Berezovsky’s role thus joined the campaign to the property settlement that stood behind it: economic privilege supplied political leverage, and political influence helped defend economic privilege.

That relationship did not end with Yeltsin’s presidency. As Yeltsin’s second term approached its close, Berezovsky again sought a successor he expected to be cooperative and promoted Vladimir Putin to the other oligarchs as a loyal choice. This later episode shows the same impulse to shape political succession, while also marking a new chapter beyond the immediate alliance with Yeltsin.