Bleeding Heartland
Sunday, Jul 4 2021
“What would you say if you saw it in another country?”
The thought experiment always resonated with me, because I saw it in another country.
During the summer of 1996, I spent six weeks in Moscow covering the Russian presidential election. Boris Yeltsin had won the presidency by a landslide in 1991, but his approval ratings cratered during his first term, due to economic hardships, corruption, and an unpopular war in Chechnya.
Eleven presidential candidates qualified for the ballot. Paradoxically, Communist candidate Gennadii Zyuganov was widely considered the only challenger with enough support to pose a serious threat to the incumbent, as well as the rival Yeltsin was best positioned to beat, through a relentless negative campaign highlighting the horrors of Soviet rule.