RUSSIA'96: THE PEOPLE CHOOSE

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To reassure those who fear his unpredictability, Zhirinovsky has gone out of his way to show that he is "just another politician and not a crazy nut," says Mitrofanov. How exactly? "By asking for the petty favors all politicians want." In Zhirinovsky's case, this meant meeting with Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin to request some specific goodies. According to Mitrofanov, Zhirinovsky asked for--and got--"a new car with a flashing blue light [to zip past Moscow's notorious traffic jams], a new dacha in the countryside, some special health cards for his family and one or two loans for some close friends."

In the end, says a Westerner who has been offering advice to the Yeltsin campaign, "this election will come down to a race between someone people hate and someone they fear." That means "never failing to remind them of what they stand to lose. Since Yeltsin can't win on his record, he must turn the question into what kind of future Russians want. There have been about 20 focus groups, and some of the polling is quite sophisticated," the adviser continues. "As in America, the battle is for the center. In Russia that's about 20% of the vote. They're the ones who'll decide it, and I really think that in the end they'll reject a return to communism."

So far, Yeltsin's advertising has been soft and squishy. Posters show happy children with Yeltsin, saying, "I love you; I have faith in you." At this point, says the adviser, "Yeltsin needs to be seen as above politics, as the President of all Russians. That's also why he won't debate Zyuganov--that and the fact that he'd be lousy at it. But the campaign won't go meekly all the way to the end. Some hard-hitting negative spots are in the can already, and those kinds of things work everywhere."

In directing the Yeltsin campaign, a major player is the President's 36-year-old daughter Tatiana Dachenko. A graduate of Moscow State University's computer-sciences department who worked with the Russian space program plotting the trajectories of docking spacecraft, Tatiana has little time these days to spend with her businessman husband and their two teenage boys. "The President trusts her almost alone to care for his interests above all else," says a Yeltsin adviser. "He's talked about blood ties being most important in a fight like this. In that sense, they're like Jack and Bobby Kennedy."

Ensconced on the 11th floor of Moscow's President Hotel, where the Yeltsin campaign has its offices, Tatiana is calling some of the key shots and signing off on some very American tactics. "She immediately grasped that sending 'truth squads' to taunt Zyuganov would appeal to Russians," says a Yeltsin adviser, "and she's championed the use of direct mail." The largest to date was a mailing three weeks ago to 3 million women veterans thanking them for their heroism and asking their forgiveness for the current economic hardships. Each was signed by Yeltsin (albeit by autopen) and individually addressed to the women. In the U.S., where voters are inundated by such mailings, they are mostly ignored. In Russia they've been heartily welcomed.