When the US swung a Russian election The full article requires subscription. Here is the rest of the main points: “When Yeltsin announced he was standing in February 1996, his chances of success were small. His political movement Our Home — Russia, had only won 10% of the vote in the legislative election of December 1995. The Communist party, headed by Gennady Zyuganov, Yeltsin’s rival for the presidency, had become the biggest party in the State Duma with nearly 25% of the vote and 157 seats (up from 42 in 1993). A former member of Yeltsin’s team recalled of the real-life events, ‘We managed to create panic at the idea that communism was returning ... queues, shortages of alcohol, cigarettes, soap. Vote, or you’ll lose! God save us from communism! Last chance to buy food! Those slogans worked’ (BBC in Russian, 5 July 2016). Time magazine revealed ‘the secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win’; its front page carried a now famous caricature of the victorious
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51