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- <text id=91TT1301>
- <title>
- June 17, 1991: Barnstorming With Boris
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991
- June 17, 1991 The Gift Of Life
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- WORLD, Page 38
- Barnstorming With Boris
- </hdr><body>
- <p>Travel aboard Yeltsin's campaign plane is not all caviar and Pepsi
- </p>
- <p>By DAVID AIKMAN/CHELYABINSK
- </p>
- <p> A deserted stretch of shoreline on a radioactive lake is
- not the ideal place to argue the merits of building a new
- nuclear power plant. This may explain why V.I. Fetisov, director
- of the Mayak nuclear-waste processing plant near Chelyabinsk,
- had little to say to the large man with silvery hair and
- thundering voice. "It doesn't seem to me," said the presidential
- candidate, "that we should build a power station of the type
- they had in mind. Absolutely not. Do you want to stick an atom
- bomb right next to Chelyabinsk?"
- </p>
- <p> It was vintage Boris Yeltsin. As local officials fidgeted
- and an accompanying press corps of 17 Soviet journalists--and
- one Western reporter--scribbled notes, Yeltsin showed how hard
- he could run for the Russian presidency. With five other
- candidates in the race and just days left before the June 12
- election, one of Yeltsin's few advantages has been his position
- as chairman of the Russian parliament. The post permits him to
- set government policy and issue decrees. But it has also enabled
- him to order a VIP version of an Aeroflot Tupolev Tu-134 jet and
- stage a 12-city swing through north and central Russia.
- </p>
- <p> Yeltsin has skillfully blended government business and
- stump campaigning on his tour. In Murmansk, Petrozavodsk and
- Sverdlovsk, Yeltsin signed agreements between the Russian
- government and the local authorities that allowed the regions
- much greater control over their economies and foreign trade. In
- his standard stump speech, he has promised that local factories
- and other enterprises will be able to trade freely with foreign
- companies and will have to hand over to the Russian government
- only 25% of their profits. Mikhail Gorbachev's power-sharing
- program, which is still in the planning stage, will call for
- factories to give 40%.
- </p>
- <p> Yeltsin's approach has drawn mixed reactions from the
- officials whose regions would most benefit from the new policies
- but whose privileges are sewn into the Communist Party patronage
- quilt. "The party should work outside the workplace, that's
- plain," Yeltsin told 4,000 workers at a jet-engine factory in
- Perm as local big shots listened glumly. "I am for the
- departification of the army, the KGB and the factory." In Tula
- this message was so badly received that officials cut off power
- to Yeltsin's microphones for an outdoor speech, then smirked as
- the candidate struggled with a bullhorn. In Chelyabinsk last
- week, security agents were so irritated by the ecstatic welcome
- offered by a crowd gathered outside the opera theater where he
- appeared that they tried to stop Yeltsin's press corps from
- entering the building.
- </p>
- <p> Such heavy-handed tactics serve only to strengthen
- Yeltsin's grass-roots support. In Perm and Chelyabinsk
- well-dressed local officials listened skeptically as Yeltsin
- addressed them. Outside the halls, however, large crowds
- carrying pro-Yeltsin banners and waving the white, blue and red
- Russian national flag cheered and applauded as Yeltsin's voice
- boomed from the loudspeakers. "I believe in the rebirth of
- Russia," Yeltsin said again and again. "How is it possible that
- in a country of 150 million people with such talent, such a huge
- territory, such rich resources, people should live so poorly?"
- Shouted a burly woman pressing against police lines in
- Chelyabinsk: "We should be in there listening to Boris
- Nikolaevich, not those partocrats!" Commented Valentina
- Lantseva, Yeltsin's main press aide: "It's like this in every
- city we've been in. People come out to support him. If they had
- a chance, they'd be demonstrating."
- </p>
- <p> The "partocrats," local apparatchiks with considerable
- administrative authority, squirmed in embarrassment as Yeltsin
- forced them to listen to the grievances of local folk. "Why is
- your vice-presidential candidate [Alexander Rutskoi] a
- Communist?" asked a gruff peasant. "Communists can work well,"
- Yeltsin responded. "They can in essence be honest people." In
- the village of Muslyumovo, north of Chelyabinsk, where the
- fallout from nuclear waste and a 1957 nuclear disaster still
- pollutes the environment, Yeltsin was clearly moved by anguished
- demands for greater government response to the village's medical
- needs. Then, like a benevolent Czar in a Russian folktale, he
- promised he would sign a parliamentary decree declaring the area
- an ecological disaster zone.
- </p>
- <p> Life aboard Yeltsin's campaign plane has its perks. The
- Tupolev jet is several cuts above most Aeroflot planes, with a
- clean interior and flight attendants who actually attend. Dinner
- on the flight to Perm included caviar on eggs, fresh salads,
- half a chicken and unlimited Pepsi, tea and coffee. Yeltsin's
- bodyguards, Makarov pistols dangling in shoulder holsters,
- bantered with officials and reporters in the aisles. The Soviet
- reporters passed around the vodka and caught up on sleep. The
- phone system is so bad that Russian reporters working
- domestically don't bother to write on laptop computers; they
- can't transmit stories back to their editors anyway. One writer
- in Yeltsin's press corps was reduced to dictating his story over
- the radiophone of a motorcade police car. Since most of the
- accompanying Soviet journalists were sympathetic to Yeltsin,
- coverage of his trip was highly favorable.
- </p>
- <p> Yeltsin needs more than just positive reporting to win the
- presidency. Early last week, pro-Communist Party newspapers
- claimed that Yeltsin's support had slid to 44% and chief rival
- Nikolai Ryzhkov's had risen to a surprisingly respectable 27%.
- The candidate seemed unfazed by the news. "These figures go up
- and down," he said in a nationally televised interview. Then,
- in characteristic fashion, he took off his suit jacket and
- conducted the rest of the session in his shirt sleeves.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
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