Happy Yeltsin Conciliatory After Bitter Campaign

A buoyant President Boris Yeltsin, his health and spirits apparently lifted by a decisive re-election victory, called on Russians Thursday to heal the wounds of a bitter campaign and signaled a steady course by renominating his loyal prime minister.

Communist Gennady Zyuganov, defeated by nearly 10 million votes in Wednesday’s election, expressed his bitterness at the “crude” inequities and “ruinous price” of the presidential campaign. Nonetheless, with emotion cracking his voice at a packed news conference, he congratulated Yeltsin on his success and ruled out instigating any street protests to upset the results.

With 99 percent of the vote counted, Yeltsin led Zyuganov by a convincing margin of 53.7 percent to 40.4 percent in the second-round runoff. Other voters cast their ballots against both candidates.

If there was an edginess to some public statements here Thursday, there was also a tone of restraint and conciliation that eased earlier fears that the Communists might refuse to accept defeat.

“Let us not divide the country into the victorious and the vanquished,” Yeltsin said in his nationally televised address this morning. “We have one Russia, a vast, great country.”

Said Zyuganov: “We respect the will of the citizens of the Russian Federation. … Restraint, cohesion and organization-these are our watchwords today.”

Seeking a silver lining in his defeat, Zyuganov declared that a two-party system is emerging in Russia and that the political muscle of the Communist-led coalition would have to be acknowledged by the new government.

Obviously relieved Western and Japanese leaders, who had feared that a Communist victory would derail market reforms and spark instability in Russia, congratulated Yeltsin.

German Chancellor Helmut Kohl told reporters he had telephoned the Russian leader. “I told him how many of us, in Germany and elsewhere, hope that he will, step by step, advance reforms to increase the rule of law, expand democratic institutions and carry out the necessary economic reforms for more social stability-and I have no doubt he will do it,” Kohl said.

Yeltsin, 65, whose health deteriorated visibly in the closing week of the campaign, seemed Thursday to have recovered. In contrast to his shaky appearance Wednesday, when he was filmed voting near a government rest house outside Moscow, he seemed in good spirits.

Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin said Yeltsin merely has a cold. The president’s wife, Naina, said on Russian television: “He never has a chance to fully get over colds. He needs to rest a bit. … It’s been a difficult four months.”

In a sign of continuity, Yeltsin named Chernomyrdin to remain in his current post, which he has held since late 1992. Chernomyrdin, 58, the stolid former head of Russia’s vast oil and gas empire, will now go about forming a new cabinet.

Before the election Zyuganov, 52, had proposed forming a coalition government in which the current cabinet, Communists and other parties would be represented on equal and perhaps balanced terms. Thursday, both Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin suggested they might incorporate members of the defeated communist-led bloc into the government, though probably not in prominent posts.

“I am confident there will room in the new team for all those in whom you have put your trust,” Yeltsin told voters in his address.

The Russian parliament has the option of voting down Yeltsin’s choice as prime minister, but it appeared unlikely that the Communists and nationalists who dominate the legislature have any appetite for a new fight with the Russian leader over his choice of the moderate Chernomyrdin. Gennady Seleznyov, the Communist speaker of the lower house, said he expects Chernomyrdin to be confirmed. Chernomyrdin, who would become interim president in the event of Yeltsin’s death , suggested the Kremlin is not expecting any major battles.