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>From http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2002/06/03/003-print.html
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News
Monday, June 03, 2002
Hollywood Spins Yeltsin Spin Doctors
By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
Staff Writer
Hollywood is working on a film about how three Americans saved Russia from
communism.
And it's almost a certain bet that the tentatively titled "The Yeltsin Project" will
rile a
number of people in Moscow.
The film, produced by the U.S. cable network Showtime Networks Inc., itself a
subsidiary of Paramount Pictures, CBS and MTV owner Viacom, will tell the story of
the U.S. political consultants who secretly worked on President Boris Yeltsin's re-
election bid in 1996 -- and whose contribution to his successful campaign was hotly
debated after his victory.
Cast to play the roles of three of the five Republican consultants are Jeff Goldblum
("Independence Day," "Jurassic Park") as George Gorton, Anthony LaPaglia
("Lantana," "The Salton Sea") as Richard Dresner and Liev Schreiber (of the
"Scream" franchise) as Joe Shumate, Showtime said in a statement.
"The film is based on the improbable, but true, story of these three Americans whose
secret involvement in Yeltsin's campaign retooled the Russian president's image and
helped convince a nation to denounce communism," the statement said.
"High Crimes" author Yuri Zeltser and his wife, Cary Bickley, wrote the script, and the
film will be directed by Roger Spottiswood ("The Sixth Day," "Tomorrow Never Dies").
The story, which was broken by Time Magazine in July 1996, created a flap in the
government and media circles. Russian campaign officials to this day call the reports
hype and insist that if anything the Americans played a minor role in the Anatoly
Chubais-managed campaign.
Time portrayed the team as a decisive force in orchestrating Yeltsin's political
comeback that used sophisticated Western campaign tools the Russians lacked.
According to Time, the Americans advised that the campaign must be built on an
anti-Communist platform and that civil war must be presented as the only alternative
to Yeltsin. The magazine also said that they were closest to Yeltsin's daughter
Tatyana Dyachenko and that they were the first to use the perception analyzer to
judge Yeltsin's public appearances or ads. A perception analyzer is a hall wired with
dials that a focus group can move to show their degree of interest or approval.
Time said the team was hired for a $250,000 fee plus costs.
Details of "The Yeltsin Project" script and release date have not been announced. A
Showtime spokesman refused Friday to comment on the film and said that a PR
agent will be assigned to the project "in about a month."
Some of the Russians who spearheaded the re-election bid said Friday that there is
no story to film.
"They [the consultants] were absolutely useless and laughable," said Mikhail
Margelov, who in 1996 was a director at the Video International advertising agency
and describes himself as No. 3 in the Yeltsin advertising campaign, after Video
International founder and Press Minister Mikhail Lesin and then-Video International
head Dmitry Abroshchenko.
"Our main task was to keep them busy so that they didn't bother us. The only product
that they generated was endless and pointless slide presentations whose meaning
can be boiled down to the three general truths: that the Volga flows into the Caspian
Sea, that horses eat oats and hay and that marriage is a serious decision," said
Margelov, who now heads the Federation Council's foreign relations committee.
Public Opinion Foundation director Alexander Oslon, who worked with the
consultants on drawing up surveys, said they had brought little if nothing to the re-
election campaign. He said he remembered the Americans had an office "in one of
the rooms at the President Hotel" and confirmed that they worked together with
Dyachenko.
He said, however, that 90 percent of the questions the Americans had wanted to ask
had already been asked by his agency and that they had not introduced the
perception analyzer. He said he had been using the analyzer since the summer of
1995. "They received the materials and reported their findings somewhere in the
President Hotel," Oslon said. "But I can say as a full-fledged participant of the
Chubais group where all the main decisions were made that there was no evidence
of their activities in the real decision-making."
Oslon said that when Chubais set up the Yeltsin campaign group in March, it was
decided that the group would not shut down the work of the other re-election groups
in the President Hotel. The Chubais group axed a proposal by one group to give
every Russian doctor a reference book with Yeltsin's signature in it, but it was
nevertheless implemented, he said.
"What the Americans were doing was somewhere on the same level as that book
project," he said. "But when the elections were over, it turned out that they were
champions of [their own] PR. It is laughable, but what can I do about the way they
position themselves in the United States?"
For Dresner, president of the Republican consulting firm Dresner, Wickers &
Associates, his participation in Yeltsin's re-election campaign features prominently on
his resume. After the campaign, he was named International Consultant of the Year
by the American Association of Political Consultants. The Time story, "Rescuing
Boris," is posted on his firm's web site.
Dresner declined to comment about the movie project Friday. But he readily gave his
account of the 1996 events. He said the consulting team -- which consisted of
himself, Gorton, Shumate, Steve Moore and Alan Braynin -- was invited to Moscow
in January 1996 by San Francisco- based businessman and Belarus native Felix
Braynin at the suggestion of Yeltsin's first campaign chief First Deputy Prime Minister
Oleg Soskovets.
"We were right across the wall from Tatyana's office and we worked closely with her
and Valentin Yumashev and Sergei Pugachyov," Dresner said.
Yumashev was Yeltsin's ghost writer and later chief of staff. Last year he married
Tatyana Dyachenko. Pugachyov is a former head of Mezhprombank and currently a
deputy in the Federation Council.
Dresner said the American consultants helped design and carry out polls and focus
groups and put their advice in written memorandums.
"We designed the strategy of the campaign, and we helped them implement the
advertising," he said. "We wrote different memos."
Dresner said he personally was involved in talks with the White House through
President Bill Clinton's adviser Dick Morris. Those talks led Clinton to persuade
Yeltsin that it was necessary to campaign "outside the Kremlin," he said.
As for the impact of their memos, Dresner said that most of the advice was used by
campaign officials -- mainly in the beginning but also after the Chubais group was set
up in March.
"Literally, just about everything we said they ended up doing -- from campaigning
outside the Kremlin to basically all the decisions they took," Dresner said. "We had
influence on this from beginning to end. And what level our influence was -- they
would like to think we had none. We would like to think we had more than none.
They certainly invested a lot of money in it."
He said the American team was paid by Russian campaign officials, but he was not
aware of the source of the funding. "For whatever reason they [Russians] felt
embarrassed for having involved Westerners in that campaign, and they want to
diminish the role as much as they can," Dresner said.
"I can't tell you we had so much influence. All I know is that we had five plus people
spending about six months there."
Dresner praised the skills and technique of Russian pollsters and confirmed that
Oslon had had a perception analyzer before the Americans came.
Told that Margelov had called the consultants useless and laughable, Dresner said:
"Tell him I feel the same way about his work. And then tell him I sent my best
regards."
He recalled a debate in 1998 at Duke University at which Margelov told him: "You
work for your boss and I work for mine and that's how we have to take it."
End<{{{
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