Referendum 1993: the "Yes Yes No Yes" campaign

When the Soviet Union fell in December 1991, the Russian Federation that replaced it had two organs of elected power. One was the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR)’s republican Congress of People’s Deputies, elected in 1990 for a five-year term. The other was the President of the RSFSR, a post the Congress created in 1991. Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007) was originally the head of the Congress, and won the RSFSR presidency in June 1991. By 1992, both the Congress and Yeltsin himself had realized that further constitutional reforms were necessary, even as everyone involved remained shaky on “basic” democratic concepts like the separation of powers.

The muddled nature of early post-Soviet democracy became a huge problem when Yeltsin began carrying out economic reforms that drew opposition from his own parliament. By December 1992, Yeltsin no longer had majority support in the Congress, even among his own pro-democracy coalition. In March 1993, Yeltsin unilaterally announced a referendum that would potentially trigger the dissolution of the Congress. In response, the Congress voted to depose Yeltsin, but came short of the required supermajority. Finally, both sides agreed that a referendum would indeed take place on 25 April, and collaborated on a questionnaire containing four Yes/ No queries:

1. Do you have confidence in the president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin?
2. Do you approve of the socioeconomic policies of the president and RF government since 1992?
3. Do you believe early elections of the RF president should take place?
4. Do you believe early elections of the People’s Deputies of the RF should take place?

Yeltsin campaigned for “Yes, Yes, No, Yes” responses to these questions, and the results—58.7% Yes on #1, 53.1% Yes on #2, 49.5% No on #3, and 67.2% Yes on #4—left him in a stronger position than the Congress. At the same time, he avoided early elections for the presidency only by a plurality (not a majority) of voters, and also came short of the simple majority of all registered voters required to trigger the dissolution of the Congress. Despite the appearance of victory for Yeltsin, then, the referendum produced only more stalemate. In September 1993, Yeltsin opted to dissolve the Congress by presidential fiat, triggering a weeklong Constitutional Crisis that concluded with the army shelling parliament on his orders. By the time it ended on 5 October 1993, the Crisis had ushered in a far more powerful presidency poised to become an authoritarian institution.

The “Yes, Yes, No, Yes” television campaign mixed footage of regular people with celebrity cameos, emphasizing that Yeltsin enjoyed broad support among those collectively engaged in the project of “building a new Russia.” At the same time, the specifics of that project went entirely unmentioned. The most extreme version of this missing substance occurs in pop star Alla Pugacheva’s (1949-) pop song, “Yes, Yes, No, Yes,” which contains no political rhetoric aside from its title. Despite its apparent vacuousness, however, Pugacheva’s Madonna-like stylings indirectly point to what “building a new Russia” meant in the popular culture of the time—the achievement of a general sense of Westernized normalcy.