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 RSFSR’s republican Congress of People’s Deputies, elected in 1990, for a five-year term. The other was the president of the Soviet Russian Republic (RSFSR), a post created in 1991 by the Congress. Boris Yeltsin was originally the head of the Congress and In June 1991 he was elected president. After the fall of the USSR, throughout 1992 both branches realized that further constitutional reforms were necessary, but did not have a good sense of separation of power amongst themselves. This became a huge problem when Yeltsin began carrying out economic reforms that a lot of Congressional membership disagreed with. By December 1992, Yeltsin no longer had majority support in the Congress, even among his own ‘pro-democracy’ coalition. In March 1993, Yeltsin announced unilaterally that there would be a referendum, which 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 the referendum needed to happen on April 25th and collaborated on the questionnaire:

* Do you have confidence in the president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin? (58.7% Yes)
* Do you approve of the socioeconomic policies of the president and RF gov’t since 1992? (53.1% Yes)
* Do you believe early elections of the RF president should take place? (49.5% No)
* Do you believe early elections of the People’s Deputies of the RF should take place? (67.2% Yes)

Yeltsin campaigned for “Yes, Yes, No, Yes” on these four questions and came out looking stronger than the Congress after the referendum. At the same time, he avoided early elections for the presidency only by a plurality of turned-out voters, and also came short of the simple majority of all registered voters that was required to trigger the Congress’s dissolution. The result was more stalemate, and eventually a decision by Yeltsin to dissolve the Congress by presidential fiat in September 1993, leading to a weeklong mini-civil war that concluded on October 5 and ultimately a far more powerful presidency poised to become an authoritarian institution.

The rhetoric around the “Yes, Yes, No, Yes” campaign was structured around regular people alongside cameos of celebrities, together stumping for Yeltsin and thus democratically, collectively engaged in the project of “building a new Russia.” At the same time, the substance of that project seems to go entirely unmentioned in these reels. The most extreme version of that missing substance is Alla Pugacheva’s pop song, “Yes, Yes, No, Yes,” which has no political rhetoric in it at all, aside from its title. At the same time, Pugacheva’s Madonna knock-off style emphasizes what “building a new Russia” means in popular culture at this time– the achievement of a general sense of Westernized normalcy in the post-Soviet country.