1991 Russian presidential election

• 1. Introduction

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  Russia's first presidential election took place on the 12th of June 1991, and Boris Yeltsin won it with 58.6% of the vote. That margin was decisive enough to eliminate any need for a runoff. Yeltsin became the first leader in Russian history ever chosen by direct popular vote.

  The office itself had not existed at the start of that year. The rules governing the contest were still being written as the campaign got underway. The forces working against Yeltsin ranged from the chief of the Soviet military's political arm to the state prosecutor to the head of national broadcasting.

  How this election came together so rapidly, who tried to derail it, and what it left unresolved are the questions worth following carefully.

• 2. Inventing the Presidency

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  Yeltsin was elected Chair of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation on the 31st of May 1990. The position made him de facto leader of the Russian SFSR. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had lobbied Supreme Soviet members to vote against Yeltsin, without success. In the 1990 legislative election, Communist candidates had taken 86% of the lower-chamber seats in the Congress of People's Deputies. Yeltsin's push to create an elected presidency was widely read as a bid for a mandate independent of that fractious legislature.

  Russians voted on the 14th of March 1991 in favor of creating offices of president and vice president and filling them by direct election. The Congress of People's Deputies stalled for more than a week before it agreed to consider the enabling legislation. On the 4th of April, it ordered the legislation drafted and set the 12th of June as a provisional election date. That date became the official one.

  Preliminary rules passed the Supreme Soviet on the 24th of April. The final governing version was not approved until three weeks before polling day. Presidential candidates needed to be aged 35-65. Any citizen over 18 could vote. A minimum of 50% turnout was required to validate the result. The winner had to take more than half of the votes cast. Presidential and vice-presidential candidates appeared on the ballot as a joint entry, in a structure resembling the American electoral model.

  To qualify for the ballot, a candidate needed either 100,000 voter signatures or the backing of 25% of Congress members. The nomination deadline was the 18th of May. Each campaign received 200,000 rubles in public financing. Commission chairman Vasilii Kazakov announced in mid-May that the full election budget came to 155 million rubles. When some voices called for a postponement to September, arguing the campaign window was too compressed, Kazakov rebuffed them. A delay, he said, would only 'keep Russia seething' for another three months.

  Moscow and Leningrad held mayoral elections on the same day. Federal subjects including Tatarstan ran their own executive contests. Cities across Russia considered whether to reclaim historic names: Sverdlovsk weighed returning to Yekaterinburg, and Leningrad weighed returning to Saint Petersburg. Drafting the law to define what the president could actually do began on the 24th of April, leaving roughly two months until the first person elected to the office was due to take power.

• 3. The Split-Vote Strategy

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  Four of the six presidential candidates were members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Only Nikolai Ryzhkov ran with the party's official nomination. The other Communist-affiliated candidates stood as self-nominated entrants.

  The 50% threshold for a first-round win was central to Communist strategy. Pulling Yeltsin below that mark would trigger a runoff. Communist leaders wagered that political conditions in Russia might shift by autumn, putting Yeltsin in a weaker position for a second round.

  Yeltsin ran as an independent, drawing organizational support from the Democratic Russia movement. His commanding lead allowed him to campaign at low intensity. He took almost no public shots at his rivals and offered very little in the way of specific policy. His challengers, trailing far behind and pressed for time, attacked both Yeltsin and each other in sharp contrast.

  Yeltsin had initially agreed to take part in televised debates but chose not to appear. Most opinion polls showed him drawing more than 60% of the vote for much of the campaign. On election day, an analysis by The Times found that even the most pessimistic surveys had him at 36%-52% of the vote. The polls, however, missed one result entirely. Three weeks before the election, Vladimir Zhirinovsky was registering just 0.5% support in surveys. That figure bore no relation to where he actually finished.

• 4. Official Obstruction

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  Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared official neutrality in the race while working privately to prevent a Yeltsin victory. His approach was to recruit additional candidates into the contest. A larger field, he calculated, would increase the odds that Yeltsin's vote would fall below 50%.

  On the 30th of April, Colonel General Nikolai Shlyaga addressed representatives of the Main Political Administration. He told them the army should be working to influence the outcome of the presidential race. He called for the creation of election committees and urged that servicemen be briefed on the relative merits of the candidates. The move was widely read as an organized campaign against Yeltsin. In early June, the Defense Ministry issued a directive to commanders in Arkhangelsk. It forbade what it called 'spy-democrats' from campaigning for the presidency among military units. Pro-Ryzhkov activity, meanwhile, was permitted to continue.

  The 11th of June edition of Sovetskaya Rossiya carried a front-page article by Nikolai Trubin, the Procurator General of the Soviet Union. Trubin accused Yeltsin of illegally offering to sell millions of rubles for dollars at several times the official exchange rate. The deal had never been carried out. RSFSR Deputy Prime Minister Gennadii Fil'shin had resigned over the matter the previous February.

  RSFSR Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev also moved against Yeltsin on election eve. He publicly confirmed allegations that Yeltsin had appointed an alleged Italian mafioso as an RSFSR honorary consul. These last-minute moves ensured that polling day began under a cloud of accusations with no time left for either side to fully respond.

• 5. Battle on the Airwaves

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  Two days before the election, Pravda published a front-page attack on Boris Yeltsin, calling him 'disloyal, authoritarian and incompetent.' That characterization was part of a broader pattern. Communist Party outlets had spent the final weeks of the campaign accusing Yeltsin of authoritarianism and incompetence.

  RTR and ORT, Russia's two major television channels, took opposite positions in the race. RTR, operated by the RSFSR government, gave Yeltsin favorable coverage. ORT, controlled by the central Soviet government, criticized him and amplified his opponents. ORT broadcast a lengthy documentary on Ryzhkov shortly before the election. It gave Yeltsin 24 hours of coverage, almost all of it hostile, while giving Zhirinovsky just 2.5 hours for the entire campaign.

  On the 27th of April, Leonid Kravchenko banned a scheduled broadcast by RSFSR television. Kravchenko chaired the Soviet State Committee on Television and Radio Broadcasting. There were concerns he might attempt to block RTR from launching regular broadcasts during the campaign period altogether. In the end, the station was allowed to begin its regular schedule on the 13th of May. Local Communist officials in many parts of Russia still managed to interfere with RTR's signal, cutting off pro-Yeltsin programming. ORT's broadcasts went undisrupted.

  Pro-Yeltsin publications directed much of their coverage toward characterizing Vladimir Zhirinovsky. They described him as 'possessed,' a 'Brownshirt,' a fascist, a chauvinist, and a Stalinist. RTR and a small number of print outlets remained the only media sources consistently giving Yeltsin favorable coverage through polling day.

• 6. Bombs, Boycotts, and Broken Ballots

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  On the 16th of May, an explosion tore through a room at Democratic Russia's headquarters in Moscow. That room held the signature sheets being collected to qualify Yeltsin for the ballot. The Baltimore Sun described it as 'the first political bombing in the capital for more than a decade.' Sovetskaya Rossiya blamed the Libertarian (Radical) Party of the Soviet Union, which denied involvement. In the city of Orenburg, a stand displaying Ryzhkov campaign materials at a local information centre was also destroyed during the same period.

  In Tatarstan, opposition to the election ran deeper. On the 28th of May, the Tatarstan Supreme Soviet declared that Tatarstan would not officially take part. Two weeks of public protests had preceded the announcement. The dispute was rooted in sovereignty: many in Tatarstan regarded the election as an encroachment on the republic's claim to self-determination. Turnout in Tatarstan fell to 36.6%. The Tatarstan presidential election, held the same day, drew more than 60% of eligible voters. A boycott in Bashkortostan was organized by the Movement for a Sovereign Bashkortistan, which had been founded jointly by the Bashkir People's Party and the Tatar Democratic Party of the Bashkir ASSR.

  One ballot printing facility in the Moscow Oblast produced 25,000 ballots with the presidential and vice-presidential candidate pairings reversed. Some ballots were distributed without the required electoral commission seal on their reverse side; votes cast on those ballots were ruled void. Vladimir Zhirinovsky attempted to contest the results, alleging that Yeltsin had used the resources of his office beyond what the campaign finance rules allowed. The challenge was unsuccessful. Results were counted by hand across roughly 98,000 polling locations and certified on the 19th of June.

• 7. Power Left Undefined

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  On the 25th of May, conservative members of the Congress of People's Deputies blocked legislation championed by Yeltsin. That bill would have explicitly allowed the president to remove local executives found guilty of violating Russian law by the Constitutional Court. The vote revealed how deeply contested the question of presidential authority already was, before a single ballot had been cast.

  The initial draft described the president as the chief executive of the RSFSR. That draft gave the office no power to dismiss the Supreme Soviet or the Congress of People's Deputies. Whether the president or the Congress held ultimate legislative authority was never clearly resolved. A two-thirds vote in the Congress, on a recommendation from the constitutional court, could remove a president who violated the constitution, laws, or oath of office.

  After the election, the committee tasked with revising the Russian Constitution deadlocked over presidential powers. Attempts to reach a resolution continued through the autumn without result. By November, the committee gave up on producing a single agreed text. It presented two competing drafts: one written by Yeltsin's allies, one by his opponents. Neither was approved.

  Yeltsin was inaugurated on the 10th of July 1991. Many commentators would later regard the 1991 election as more free and fair than any subsequent Russian presidential contest. The failure to define the boundary between presidential and legislative authority did not dissipate after the vote. It carried forward until 1993, when it produced what became known as the Russian constitutional crisis.