https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/132055
"Vyiti iz tupika [To Get Out of the Impasse]," an op-ed coauthered by Berezovsky, Gusinsky and other prominent 'oligarchs,' in which they announce their intention to use all media resources at their disposal to sink Ziuganov's chances of beating Yeltsin in the 1996 election.
Post-Soviet
1996
In the lead-up to the 1996 presidential election, Boris Yeltsin’s ratings were underwater, he himself had suffered four strokes, and the Duma’s majority and speakership were held by KPRF– the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, a new institution that drew on some old KPSS cadres, but tried to distinguish its ideology from that of its predecessor, while nevertheless heavily deploying key topoi of Soviet nostalgia to attract an electorate that saw Yeltsin’s regime as the source of the hardships of the 1990s. KPRF’s Gennadii Ziuganov was on the rise and widely expected to win the presidency. At this time, seven of the leading post-Soviet ‘oligarchs,’ who until then were engaged in constant internecine struggle, declared a truce and decided to collaborate to get Yeltsin re-elected, out of a shared sense of certainty that the KPRF’s coming to power would spell disaster for themselves and for post-Soviet Russia. The oligarchs had reached this decision together in Davos in February 1996, after hearing Ziuganov’s presentation at the Davos Forum. Collaboration meant not merely contributing money to Yeltsin’s campaign, but also directing their vast media holdings– which included almost all nation-wide TV networks– to peddle Yeltsinist propaganda, while aggressively tarring Ziuganov as a radical ‘red-brown’ reincarnation of Stalin/Hitler. The decision by the leading oligarchs to collaborate was no secret, and the following joint letter was printed in Russia’s first ‘business daily,’ Kommersant, to explain their reasoning.
Kommersant’s editorial introduction to the letter celebrates the signatories’ pragmatism and good citizenship, but also lets slip that the oligarchs got rich as a result of “sitting closely to the prime minister “ and competing in “ill-starred mortgage auctions”– a.k.a. “loans for shares”, in which state property (especially holdings of oil, gas and metals) was sold off at bargain basement prices to business interests who were immediately suspected of having colluded with each other and with Yeltsin’s cabinet insiders.
Meanwhile, the letter frames the oligarchs’ collaboration through appeals to conservative rhetorical tropes, such as a need to preserve Russian “statehood,” its “great sovereignty,” and even the ethnic Russians’ “constructing role” vis-a-vis the “union” of peoples in the Russian Federation. At the same time, the text frames the oligarch’s path as a centrist one, between the “whites” and the “reds.” Most importantly, it ends with a threat– that the signatories posess the necessary resources to dispose of “overly unprincipled” or “overly uncompromising” politicians. This conservative-centrist rhetoric, combined with the brazen tactics that were deployed to help Yeltsin raise his ratings and ultimately to falsify the election, as well as the willingness of the oligarchs’ mass-media underlings to fall in line, laid the groundwork for Putinist political practices.
Berezovsky, Boris, Gorodilov, Viktor , Dundukov, Aleksandr , Mikhailov, Nikolai, Muravlenko, Sergei, Nikolaev, Aleksei, Nevzlin, Leonid, Orlov, Dmitry, Potanin, Vladimir, Smolensky, Aleksandr (Alexander), Fridman, Mikhail , Gusinsky, Vladimir, and Khodorkovsky, Mikhail
Russia
Kommersant, April 27, 1996