2000 Russian presidential election

• 1. Introduction

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  The 2000 Russian presidential election effectively began on the 31st of December 1999, when Boris Yeltsin resigned as president on live television. The resignation started a legal countdown: Russian law required a new election within three months of the office falling vacant. Yeltsin told the country, 'Russia should enter the new millennium with new politicians, new faces, new people, who are intelligent, strong and energetic, while we, those who have been in power for many years, must leave.' Under the constitution, his prime minister Vladimir Putin immediately became acting president.

  Getting there took under a year, compressed by a legal deadline and shaped by a government that kept cycling through leaders. A war in Chechnya ran through the whole campaign, shaping it from start to finish. Putin would have to turn a caretaker title into a mandate of his own, in a contest whose rules, candidates and coverage were all still being decided.

• 2. A Revolving Door

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  In the spring of 1998, Boris Yeltsin dismissed Viktor Chernomyrdin, who had served as his prime minister for years, replacing him with Sergey Kirienko. Months later, in August 1998, Russia's government defaulted on its debt and devalued the rouble on the same day. That crisis cost Kirienko his job, and Yevgeny Primakov took over as prime minister. Primakov himself lasted only until May 1999, when Sergei Stepashin replaced him. By August 1999, Vladimir Putin held the post, Yeltsin's fifth prime minister in under two years.

  Few Russians recognized Putin's name when he took office, and fewer still had reason to like what they knew. He arrived tied to an unpopular Yeltsin government and to his own recent post leading Russia's Federal Security Service in 1998 and 1999.

  In the late summer and early fall of 1999, a wave of bombings tore through apartment buildings across Russia, killing hundreds and injuring thousands. Officials blamed Chechen militants, and the attacks gave Putin a chance to present himself as the tough leader who could face down that threat.

  That crisis of leadership left Yeltsin searching for a successor he could trust, even as his own hold on power grew shakier by the month.

• 3. Yeltsin's Reckoning

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  Yeltsin's own standing had collapsed by this point, dragged down by the Skuratov, Mercata and Mabetex scandals, which had already produced articles of impeachment. He narrowly survived that impeachment vote in May 1999. Yevgeny Primakov and Yuri Luzhkov were seen as the frontrunners for the presidency around that time, and both had openly criticized Yeltsin. Yeltsin feared that either man, if he reached power, might see him and his family prosecuted for corruption. Primakov had suggested he would be 'freeing up jail cells for the economic criminals he planned to arrest.'

  On the 19th of December 1999, the Kremlin-aligned Unity Party placed second in the parliamentary elections with 23 percent, behind the Communist Party's 24 percent. By forming a coalition with Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces, Yeltsin secured a working majority in the Duma. By that same December vote, Putin's approval had climbed to 79 percent, with 42 percent of Russians saying they would vote for him as president.

  Before Yeltsin resigned, the presidential election had been expected in June or July of 2000. The Duma had already scheduled a first round for the 4th of June, with a runoff set for the 25th if no one won outright. Early 2000 brought an alliance between Unity and the Communist Party in the Duma, cutting off Putin's rivals Yevgeny Primakov, Grigory Yavlinsky and Sergei Kiriyenko. Yuri Luzhkov, freshly reelected as Mayor of Moscow, announced he would not run for president. Primakov withdrew two weeks after the parliamentary vote. The early election date also cut the odds that public opinion might turn against the war in Chechnya.

  The rules governing that shortened race were about to be rewritten from the ground up.

• 4. A New Rulebook

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  In December 1999, Russia adopted a new federal law titled 'On the election of the president of the Russian Federation.' It required candidates to gather a million signatures for nomination, a threshold cut to 500,000 once the shortened timetable took effect. A first round majority was enough to win outright; short of that, the top two finishers would face a runoff decided by simple majority. The same law also tightened the rules on campaign finance considerably. Paired with the compressed calendar, it left Putin well positioned, since he could count on favorable coverage from state television.

  That rulebook would decide not just how the vote was run, but who was even allowed to appear on the ballot.

• 5. Twelve Names On The Ballot

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  Of 33 people nominated for the presidency, only 15 submitted the required paperwork to Russia's Central Electoral Committee, and just 12 were registered to run. Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party since 1993, registered on the 28th of January 2000. Grigory Yavlinsky, who had led the Yabloko party since 1995, registered on the 15th of February 2000. Vladimir Zhirinovsky ran again as leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, a post he had held since 1991. Two sitting governors joined the ballot too: Konstantin Titov of Samara Oblast and Aman Tuleyev of Kemerovo Oblast. Ella Pamfilova, a former Minister of Social Protection of the Population of Russia, and Stanislav Govorukhin, a Duma deputy and film director, also stood. Yury Skuratov, the country's former Prosecutor General, and businessman Umar Dzhabrailov rounded out the field, alongside Alexey Podberezkin of the Spiritual Heritage party. Putin himself registered on the 7th of February 2000, running as an independent with the backing of Unity, OVR and the Union of Right Forces.

  Yevgeny Savostyanov, a former Kremlin deputy chief of staff, had thrown his support behind Yavlinsky. He withdrew on the 21st of March 2000, the only nominee who never made it to polling day.

  How each of these twelve chose to present themselves, or chose not to, would count for more than any single name.

• 6. The Non-Campaign

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  Gennady Zyuganov campaigned against wholesale private ownership, though he backed returning illegally privatized property to the state. He opposed private land ownership, called for strong public services, and pledged to resist expansion by the United States and NATO.

  Grigory Yavlinsky ran as a free marketer who still wanted firm state oversight of public money. He called for an end to the black market, reform of the tax system, more public services, and a stronger State Duma. He also wanted a smaller civil bureaucracy. Yavlinsky was the most pro-Western of the major candidates, yet he had criticized the war in Chechnya and stayed wary of NATO himself.

  Putin's own platform rested on two lines: 'dictatorship of the law' and 'the stronger the state, the freer the people.' As one account put it, 'He held no rallies, gave no speeches, and refused to participate in debates with his challengers.' His visible campaign amounted to a single biographical interview on state television. It also included a series of further interviews financed by Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch who had helped build the Unity Party under Yeltsin. His platform appeared most fully in an 'Open letter to Russian voters,' printed in national newspapers on the 25th of February 2000. Because he skipped the debates, his rivals had no stage on which to press him on a program that many called deliberately vague.

  Whatever edge Putin held on paper was about to be magnified many times over by the cameras covering the race.

• 7. Stacked Airwaves

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  One analysis of the 1999 and 2000 election coverage concluded that 'it was ORT, and state television more generally, that had helped to create a party on short notice.' The same analysis added that 'its coverage... was strongly supportive of the party it had created.' Putin received over a third of the television coverage given to all candidates. That was as much as Zyuganov's 12 percent, Yavlinsky's 11 percent and Zhirinovsky's 11 percent combined. He also drew more than a third of print coverage, receiving outsized attention even from newspapers that opposed him. After winning, Putin said he believed in a free press, but insisted it should not become 'means of mass disinformation and tools of struggle against the state.' He also pushed state media to supply what he called 'objective information.'

  The PACE observers delegation concluded that 'the unequal access to television was one of the main reasons for a degree of unfairness of the campaign.' It found that media generally, state owned or private, 'failed to a large extent to provide impartial information about the election campaign and candidates.' ORT ran what observers called a slanderous campaign against Yavlinsky once his ratings began climbing. NTV, one of the few independent broadcasters, came under mounting financial and administrative pressure through the campaign.

  Holding the vote in Chechnya at all was contentious, given the military campaign underway there. The region's legislative elections the previous December had already been suspended for the same reasons. Observers also reported serious alleged forgeries that could have affected the size of Putin's first round win. The Boston Globe's David Fillipov was among several Western journalists detained or expelled for straying from Russian military guidance in Chechnya. Andrei Babitsky of Radio Liberty was arrested on charges of aiding the Chechens. Both under Yeltsin and under Putin, the Kremlin applied financial pressure to Media-Most, a holding group whose coverage had been unfriendly. Zyuganov, for his part, received noticeably fairer coverage than he had in the previous presidential race.

  None of this scrutiny would change how the ballots were about to be counted, region by region.

• 8. The Vote

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  Polling stations opened at 8 a.m. and closed at 8 p.m. on the 26th of March 2000. Putin won outright on the first ballot, taking 53.4 percent of the vote. His strongest showing came in Ingushetia, at 85.42 percent, while his weakest arrived next door in Chechnya, at 29.65 percent.

  Zyuganov's support swung from 47.41 percent in the Lipetsk region down to 4.63 percent in Ingushetia. Yavlinsky ranged from 18.56 percent in Moscow to 0.42 percent in Dagestan. Zhirinovsky ranged from 6.13 percent in the Kamchatka region to just 0.29 percent in Ingushetia.

  In Kemerovo Oblast, Putin managed only 25.01 percent and Zyuganov just 14.93 percent, both far below their totals almost everywhere else. That gap lines up with the region's own governor, Aman Tuleyev, carrying his home territory as a candidate in his own right. Tuleyev's apparent hold on Kemerovo, together with Zyuganov's high mark in Lipetsk, marks something specific in Russian political history. As of 2024, 2000 remains the last Russian presidential election in which anyone other than the winner carried a federal subject at all.