In this second extract from his new book, Global Electioneering: Campaign consulting, communications and corporate financing (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), Gerry Sussman examines how the practice of manipulating elections has been introduced to the Russian Federation and goes on to highlight similar practices in Serbia and Iraq.

In the 1990s, Russia was the plum of the American consulting contracts. First, in the production of 1993 TV spotsand then in the 1996 Russian presidential election, the country’s first American consultants were invited in to spin the world for capitalism and Boris Yeltsin against Communist Party (KPRF) challenger, Gannady Zyuganov. The U.S. and its allies did not rely on the consultants alone, of course, in this epic political battle. Just before the 1996 election, the U.S. helped bankroll Yeltsin with $14 billion in loans. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl committed an additional $2.7 billion, most of which was fully unconditional (thereby permitting massive vote-buying by the Yeltsin forces). French prime minister Alain Juppé added $392 million to the kitty, “paid entirely into Russian state coffers”. And the head of the International Monetary Fund, Michel Camdessus, committed his organization, as a “moral obligation”, to supporting Yeltsin’s privatization plans, with most of the IMF funds going to the state treasury for discretionary spending, but warned that fincancial assistance would be suspended in the event of a Communist Party victory in the election (Weir, 1996, pp. 38-41). “In the end, though, the KPRF’s door-to-door campaign was obliterated by the heavily researched, well-financed, media saturating, modern campaign waged by the Yeltsin team” (Mendelson, 2001).

Operating under cloak in the Yeltsin campaign were consultants who had worked for California Republican governor Pete Wilson, his long-time top strategist, George Gorton, his deputy chief of staff Joe Shumate, and a political advisor in several campaigns, Richard Dresner. They were joined by Steven Moore, an American public relations specialist, and a Russian TV advertising production company, Video International. Dresner was a former business partner of Dick Morris and former gubernatorial campaign consultant to Bill Clinton. Morris, in turn, was Clinton’s main political advisor, and acted as a liaison between the U.S president and his friends working for Yeltsin, although the White House denied any interference in the Russian election (Deutsche Presse-Agentur, 1996b).

Video International (VI) staff were trained for the election by the American advertising firm, Ogilvy and Mather, which is part of the worldwide WPP advertising group. The campaign strategy, including archival footage of Stalin’s brutality, was to attack the KPRF and Zyuganov with an assortment of anti-Communist tactics. Within just a few years of the fall of the Soviet Union, this was an extraordinary turnaround in Russian (former Soviet) politics. As one scholar found in her interviews with VI, the company’s producers mocked Zyuganov for failing to grasp the the importance of political marketing (Mendelson, 2001, n. 76), which indicated another remarkable adaptation in Russian thinking. VI was run by former KGB member, Mikhail Margolev, who had previously spent five years with American advertising agencies. Margolev next joined the Putin public relations team for the 2000 election campaign. Since then he has became a ‘senator’ in the Federation Council, Russia’s legislative upper chamber. Another VI company executive, Mikhail Lesin, became Putin’s press minister. Lesin is known in Russia for harassing media outlets that are critical of the Putin government (Kramer, 1996; Mendelson, 2001, n. 73), anticipating a growing authoritarian style of that leadership.

The American campaign consultants also worked closely with Yeltsin’s daughter and campaign operations manager, Tatyana Dyachenko, passing on to their Russian counterparts the American political art of spin doctoring (Deutsche Presse-Agentur, 1996a; Kramer, 1996). According to a published news report, “they advised the campaign on organization, strategic and tactical use of polls and focus groups” with a “central campaign message of anti-communism”, a role they shared with Burson-Marsteller and other American public relations firms (Deutsche Presse-Agentur, 1996a; Wedel, 2001, p. 143). They also advised Yeltsin to think in terms of how to make the state-run television stations “bend to your will”. Boasting that they had saved Yeltsin from certain defeat and Russia from a return to the Cold War, the Republican consultants admitted to employing a host of manipulative tactics in their advertising strategy to sow fear among Russians (Kramer, 1996). Gorton made the overblown comment that "Russia needs democracy.... I would be remiss in my duty to mankind if I didn't use every political consulting trick I could think of to keep what I felt was a great evil from returning to mankind" (Maxfield and Schlesinger, 1996, p. 15). A Time report on the work of the American consultants in Russia came with the brazen cover lead, “Yanks to the Rescue” — later inspiring a Showtime (cable TV) film undertaking, “Spinning Boris”,  about how American heroics “saved Russia from communism” (Zolotov, 2002). Gorton, Shumate, and Dresner went on to work for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2003 gubernatorial campaign.

The consultants’ political ads, mostly aired over state-run television and radio stations, which Yeltsin fully controlled, had warned that a Zyuganov victory would bring back a command economy and a climate of terror (Hellinger, 1996, pp. 10-11). For ‘personality’ styling designed to capture younger voters, the Americans had Yeltsin appear at rock concerts and ‘dance’ onstage at one of them. Some of Yeltsin’s Russian advisors did not approve of the stunt (Stevenson, 2000b). Ignored in the campaign were the out-of-control economy, Yeltsin’s poor health, alcoholic addiction, and his broad use of repressive tactics while serving as an unelected head of state. Despite his autocratic tendencies as head of state, disregard for constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, frequent money-laundering scandals, and brutal war in Chechnya, Yeltsin received the unreserved endorsement of the leaders of the main market economies, as if open markets were the only real measure of a democracy (Mendelson, 2001). A Time magazine correspondent rationalized the American intervention in pure Machiavellian logic: “Democracy triumphed — and along with it came the tools of modern campaigns, including the trickery and slickery Americans know so well. If these tools are not always admirable, the result they helped achieve in Russia surely is” (Kramer, 1996).

It is, of course, not only the United States that has mastered the art of political propaganda. Several domestic election consulting firms have since sprung up in Russia. This should not be entirely surprising given that much of the rationale for the development of advanced communications technologies and technology-aided propaganda is rooted in the reflexive ideological assumptions and policies of the Cold War. In their post-Cold War political culture, partly inspired by their American counterparts, Russia now has a Center of Political Technologies, which sells its expertise in joining centers of power to the latest methods of political campaigning (Plasser & Plasser, 2002, p. 35). Russian business groups have learned to give their money directly to the consultants rather than to the candidates, which more tightly couples policy to patronage (Corwin, 2002), a tactic that corresponds to “soft money” financing in the United States.

Russia also has a Center of Political Consulting, more popularly known as ‘Niccolo M’ — referring to the famed master theorist of political manipulation and spin doctoring, Machiavelli. By 2002, the Niccolo M public relations organization, which was trained in National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funded International Republican Institute (IRI) and National Democratic Institute (NDI) seminars, was joined by many other new political consulting groups, who not only help design campaign strategies but also arrange contacts between businesses and Kremlin officials. Niccolo M used all the techniques learned from its mentors, including candidate marketing, polling, focus groups, direct mail, phone banks, heavy use of the mass media, and attack ads. Following the 1996 campaign, the KPRF began studying Western campaign manuals and adopting the same tactics (Corwin, 2002; Mendelson, 2001).

While Yeltsin’s daughter acted as his de facto campaign manager, the person officially in charge was Anatoly Chubais, a person who links the dominant political and economic forces in Russia. He led Russia’s privatization plan and related legal ‘reforms’ (seen widely in Russia as mainly reckless schemes to benefit his cronies) and was put in charge of Russian relations with the major international lending institutions as well as other foreign economic consultants. Chubais also served for a time as Yeltsin’s first deputy prime minister, minister of finance, and chief of staff. Later he became the CEO of the state’s electricity monopoly and went on to help organize the presidential campaign of Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin. His principal American consultant contacts on the privatization plans were from Harvard University’s Institute for International Development (HIID), which “served as the gatekeeper for hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and G-7 taxpayer aid, subsidized loans, and other Western funds and was known simply as the Harvard Project” (Wedel, 2001, pp. 125, 241).

HIID’s influence extended to the coordination of $300 million in USAID grants that went to the the global public relations firm, Burson-Marsteller, and the “big six” international accounting firms operating in Russia. The key Harvard-connected economists who were part of the privatization scheme were ‘shock therapy’ specialist Jeffrey Sachs, Russian-born Andrei Shleifer, David Lipton, an associate of Sachs before becoming the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for international affairs, and Lawrence Summers, chief economist at the World Bank (1991-1993) and later Clinton’s Treasury secretary. USAID eventually cancelled support for the Harvard group because of alleged misuse of its funds for personal aggrandizement by the project’s economists. This led to investigations of HIID by the assistance agency, the Department of Justice, and the U.S. General Accounting Office (Wedel, 2001, pp. 125-132, 239-241).

American political consulting in Russia has been part of a larger program to transform that country into a market economy and place it under the control of stable and reliable pro-capitalist, pro-U.S. elected officials, regardless of their less than democratic inclinations. Janine Wedel argues that beyond the technical advice of American consultants, ”U,S. support also helped to propel [Chubais] Clan members into top positions in the Russian government and to make them formidable players in local politics and economics”. This led to the conversion of major state enterprises to private ownership. The Harvard group actually ”drafted many many of the Kremlin decrees” to this effect (Wedel, 2001, pp. 125, 142).

American political consultants also came to the rescue in another former socialist state situation targeted as an immediate U.S. foreign policy objective: the overthrow of official enemy Slobodan Milosevic in 1999. The U.S. Congress appropriated millions of dollars on behalf of political parties, media, and unions opposed to Milosevic. Normally isolationist, Senator Jesse Helms introduced a bill to spend as much as $100 million to overthrow the regime (Myers, 1999). In pursuit of regime change, the Clinton administration contracted polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland to work the numbers on behalf of the U.S.-backed candidate, Vojislav Kostunica. It is reported that the U.S. government spent $41 million, in which ”U.S.-funded consultants played a crucial role behind the scenes in virtually every facet of the anti-Milosevic drive, running tracking polls, training thousands of activists and helping to organize a vitally important parallel vote count” (Dobbs, 2000).            

Costs included compensating monitors to watch the polls, funds for spray painting political graffiti, and 2.5 million stickers with anti-Milosevic slogans, paid by  USAID and assisted by a private Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm, Ronco Consulting Corp. (Dobbs, 2000). Nominally a government institution involved only in economic assistance work, USAID funneled money to other private contractors and non-profits, including the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute. (See Chapter 3.) The IRI was mainly engaged with a Serbian organization, Otpor, in ideological and organizational efforts. AID previously had had such a nefarious history associated with political and human rights abuses that Congress in 1973 had to formally ban its involvement in foreign police training programs. This did not end AID’s interference in foreign political affairs.

In Iraq, before the Bush administration got bogged down in attempting to eliminate the resistance to the 2003 invasion, the Clinton White House was already seeking ways to build a political opposition in that country and spent $8 million in 1999 toward that end. The public relations company Burson-Marsteller together with Quality Support, Inc. were paid to bring together some 300 Iraqi opposition leaders at a New York-based convention. Portions of a military appropriations bill designed to topple Saddam Hussein were disbursed by the Clinton administration on office and communications equipment with the intention of launching an Iraqi propaganda war against the Saddam regime. Republicans in Congress mocked the political effort and urged a more direct, military form of intervention (Myers, 1999).

Political consultants are part of a larger stream of operatives who work toward objectives that are consistent within the Democrat to Republican policy and ideological spectrum and no further. During the height of the Cold War, the U.S. used CIA operatives such as Edward Lansdale to carry out ‘advisory’ roles in Southeast Asia. By the 1990s, without the countervailing presence of the USSR, the U.S. saw less necessity to carry out interventionist policies in such a subterranean way. Although foreign electoral interference remains a delicate matter for many countries, the presence of American consultants operating on their shores as political fixers has become a more open affair than in the past. With U.S.-based TNCs running or subcontracting work throughout the world and increasingly dependent on remote resources, especially in oil and other extractive industries, the stability of the U.S. political economy relies more than ever on governing structures in other countries that are willing to cooperate with its agenda of open trade and investment, privatization, and minimal state spending on social welfare.