Boris Yeltsin was sworn in as President of Russia (RFSFR) on 10 July. The ceremony was held in the Kremlin's Palace of Congresses. Soviet President Gorbachev attended and spoke at the ceremony, as did Alexei, the Patriarch of All Russia.
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Yeltsin was elected President of the RFSFR on June 12, defeating five other candidates, including the former Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, to win a comfortable victory on the first ballot.
The Russian Federation's Congress of People's Deputies had decided on April 5 to create a new, directly elected executive president of the Republic, an idea already overwhelmingly endorsed by a republican referendum held in March on the same day as the all-union referendum on the preservation of the USSR.
The campaign was dominated by the radical-conservative contest between Yeltsin and Ryzkhov and the questions of how many votes the Russian Communist Party could mobilize on Ryzhkov's behalf and whether Yeltsin would secure enough votes to win election on the first round. Yeltsin's choice of Col. Alexander Rutskoi, the founder of the Communists for Democracy group in the Russian parliament, signified his intention to maximise his support among moderate as well as radical voters. Bakatin, although he had been dismissed by Gorbachev as Interior Minister in December 1990 as a result of conservative pressure, was seen as the Soviet President's candidate whose role was to win enough votes to deny Yeltsin a first round victory.
Campaigning by the six candidates was intensive--with many public meetings and rallies, much press coverage, and a number of television and radio interviews and debates--but lacklustre. Campaign expenditure was limited to a maximum of 200,000 roubles (about US$330,000) per candidate. The only blot on an otherwise clean campaign came on the eve of the poll when the communist newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya published a report implying that Yeltsin had been involved in an illegal deal to sell billions of roubles at a cheap rate to a British company. Earlier the paper had published allegations of Yeltsin's involvement with the Italian Mafia.
The turnout was recorded as 74.66 per cent of those eligible to vote. A total of 79,498,240 ballots were cast, of which 1,716,757 (2.16 per cent) were deemed spoilt or invalid and 1,525,410 (1.92 per cent) were not counted because the names of all six candidates had been crossed out. Yeltsin won majorities in more than 80 of the 88 electoral districts. As expected, his majorities in Moscow, Leningrad and other Russian cities were very big, while in many rural and outlying regions they were much smaller.
Most observers summarised the results as a triumph for Yeltsin, a disaster for the Russian Communist Party which had backed Ryzhkov, and a humiliation for Bakatin who came bottom of the poll.
This article comes from Keesings Worldwide Online
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