Russian Vote Reveals Shift In Fault Lines

By David Hoffman, Washington Post, Tuesday 28 March 2000; A1

MOSCOW, March 27 — Across the fertile southwestern crescent of Russia, the political map in recent years has always been painted red — sympathetic to Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov and symbols of the fallen Soviet empire.

In this region, Boris Yeltsin and his liberal reformers fared poorly through the 1990s. Yeltsin was always saved by a strong showing in the big cities, especially liberal Moscow and St. Petersburg.

But a striking change emerged from the returns in Sunday's presidential vote: The red belt was wiped out. A new political bulldozer, Vladimir Putin, who won the presidency with 52.5 percent of the vote, virtually pushed Zyuganov off the map in his own territory.

This turnaround suggests a fundamental change in the Russian electorate may be unfolding, analysts and politicians said today. In the Yeltsin years, there was a huge fault line between the democrats and reformers on one side, and the Communists and nationalists on the other. Yeltsin's campaign in 1996 was cast as a black-and-white contest between the forces of reform and of communism.

But now a different fault line is being drawn. Some analysts say it is a more pragmatic one: a division between those who have adapted to the new Russian market democracy, and those who have not. The adapters, especially young people, voted for Putin, while Zyuganov continued to pull those who have not managed to find a place in the new society — an older, more traditional electorate.

The number of votes for Zyuganov fell over four years. He drew 23.6 million voters in the first-round contest with Yeltsin in 1996, but got only 20.7 million this time.

“Today the division [of] democrats versus Communists ceases to exist,” said former prime minister Sergei Kiriyenko, now leader of a pro-market party in the lower house of parliament, the State Duma.

“The old Communist and anti-Communist polarization of Russia and the electorate is over,” said Michael McFaul, a Stanford University professor and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's office here. “A solid majority have adjusted, and a solid minority have not. Instead of a geographic polarization, you get the break in each region.”

In the 1996 campaign against Yeltsin, Zyuganov won a majority in about half of Russia's 89 regions. But in Sunday's match, in which he came in second with 29.4 percent of the vote, Zyuganov won a majority in only four regions outright. A fifth region, Kemerovo, in the coal-rich Kuzbas area, went for the local governor, Aman Tuleev. But the other 84 regions were won by Putin.

The presidential election is won by popular vote, not by winning individual regions. But the changing colors of the map from one election to the next help illustrate trends in the electorate.

Zyuganov even lost the Orlovskaya region, his home and the place he had once served in the Soviet Communist Party, to Putin. While this area south of Moscow was Zyuganov's for the asking in 1996 — he defeated Yeltsin 54.2 to 21.5 percent — Putin narrowly defeated Zyuganov this time. Putin also wiped out Zyuganov in Krasnodar, where Zyuganov had triumphed over Yeltsin four years ago.

Putin's success in spreading his victory across the geographic divides of the world's largest country was in part due to the powerful governors in each region. Fearing tighter reins from the Kremlin, many governors apparently went into overdrive to try to bring home votes for Putin.

Putin's strength in formerly Communist-leaning regions is not explained by any events in the campaign. There were no climactic debates or collisions; Putin was not a crusader against communism like Yeltsin. Putin made a studied effort to woo Communist voters, and Zyuganov was largely ignored by the Kremlin.

“Putin tried to be the candidate for all the country, and he tried to integrate different groups,” said Leonid Gozman, an adviser to Anatoly Chubais, the architect of Russian privatization and a leader of the economic reformers. “Putin said Russia may join NATO to please the liberals, but he also said he wants military training in schools from the first grade, to please the Zyuganov people.”

Masha Volkenstein, a pollster, said Putin had no single political identity, and this allowed him to take votes from the Communists and others. Moreover, she said, voters were “tired of Zyuganov” and other candidates who have been on the political scene for years, including Grigory Yavlinksy, leader of the Yabloko party in parliament, who came in third with 5.85 percent, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist, who suffered a humiliating fifth place with 2.5 percent of the vote.

These results suggest that Russia is moving more toward a two-party system, or at least away from the multitude of parties and blocs that competed for attention in the first years after the Soviet collapse. “All of them are history,” said McFaul. “All of the third, fourth and fifth place candidates from 1996 matter not in the least in this outcome.”

“We used to talk about the nationalists, the liberals, the ‘party of power’ and the Communists,” he added. “It's only one election, but the nationalists and the liberals are in crisis.”