Folks, I said this before in another thread very recently, I will say it again here: Putin was not destined for anything, except to be another dipshit KGB colonel who got a job in the security forces after the collapse because that is all he knew to do and had no life skills beyond it. His ascendancy was due to Yeltsin's quirks and him being in the right place at the right time. I know Bajorans believe you make your own luck, but Stepashin had as much potential as Putin and probably had more brains as well at one point.
Zyuganov would not have been allowed to win. It's as simple as that, in my view. Yeltsin's victory in '96 was a snow-job. If it was not fixed, it was not for lack of trying. Every national TV channel in Russia ran stories on him running at the exclusion of virtually every one else. The government channels hailed his "comeback," and the TV stations that were owned by the oligarchs all sang praises of Yeltsin. The poor dumb Western hacks in Moscow did their job as well, rolling out cliches and treating Yeltsin's campaign as a man on the cusp of reform if he only gets a bit more time in the office. Clinton's college buddy and author of the laziest hack book on Russia I had ever read ("The Russia Hand") carried some water, too, making sure the political interests in the West pretended Yeltsin was a decent democrat in need of support, which he wasn't in '96, but the other options were rather appalling.
For Zuyganov to have won would have required Yeltsin to truly and utterly piss off enough oligarchs (or Gusinsky by himself) that they could rationalize working a deal with the refried nostalgia act of Comrade Zee. Considering the ambitious politicians all had left the Communist Party and stuck to the coat-tails of Yeltsin and his rotating cast of Prime Ministers, Zee had no one in his kitchen cabinet who could have brokered that deal been treated with a straight face. Zee would have to be less of himself to do such a deal, and anyone who has watched that moon faced Pagliacci sing his "Vesti La Giubba" knows his range goes from Brezhnev-Lite to Brezhnev-Coors-Light.
There would also had to have been an agreement with the military. Here Zee would have to cut a deal with Lebed. But Lebed was an odd cat and he would have only cut a deal if he knew for a fact that Yeltsin was doomed and he (Lebed) would not have gotten the prize. If the first part of the previous sentence was proven true, then the second part would have been very much up in the air, because Lebed could have gotten the moderates that Zee never would have gotten. This is the crux of the problem as I see it, in any scenario that favors Zee, Lebed is the beneficiary of the same issues that would have helped Zee and he could potentially make a much finer meal out of it than the communist clown.
The gangsters would also have been mollified. Not the tattooed freaks running jails and killing people for welshing on cards debts, though they too would require some kind of sop, but the new breed of mob actually making money, whose foot soldiers wore tracksuits with chains and whose leaders bought double breasted Armani suits because that's what John Gotti wore on his way to arraignment. These "bandits" would need assurances that racketeering would not be interrupted in an unacceptable way. Oh, to be sure, some ethnic gang full of kids with olive skin who hijack cars and beat up people at street markes would need cracking down on, Comrade, but us decent pale Russians have businesses to run and bankers to murder here. Can't interrupt that, can you?
But even an in with the mob, the army and some of the oligarchs would not have been enough. For the mid-major old guard in the KGB too would require a seat at the table. They were never too warm on Yeltsin, but they didn't fancy backing a loser. That much they had drilled into their heads, watching those in the security forces who committed themselves to the political causes a trifle too much lose their way and their income when backing losers. These "silovki" wanted to back a winner, but still beat their chest for a stronger Fatherland. Putin was but one part of an entire generation of these small folk, with Stepashin being another. They would need an assurance that Zee was winning in order to back him and help stop some of the snow-job that Yeltsin was pulling.
But that would still not be enough. You would also have to deal with the West. Here Zee, if he had a clue - and he did not, he really, really did not, because everyone with a clue was too busy making money for the new overlords - could have burnished his credentials by conversing with foreign leaders and being the Leader of the Opposition. The trouble with Zee is that if he had that sentence read out to him by one of his minions in '96, he would nod sagely and go get his picture taken with Muammar Gaddafi, and then be confused by why some people would react badly to that.
For the final act here, I would have somebody hit Zhirinovsky over the head with a snow shovel a month before the election and for Zee to speak in his Jim Ross Owen Hart voice at his next press conference that dark forces of NATO and United States and possibly Illuminati were gunning for honorable opponent Vladimir Wolfovich and speak of an admiration for his "patriotism." Without the clown-prince of fascism to siphon off popular dissent, Zee might have picked up the votes there.
And after all that, we might get Zyuganov as the winner, or we might not have, because short of Yeltsin chainsawing three rabbis on Purim in a synagogue, there was no way Berezovsky was switching sides, and even with the dead rabbis, he could justify sticking by Yeltsin. And with Berezovsky on Yeltsin's side... it'd be rough going, even with all the forces I have given Zee. Gusinsky would be the counterweight, but Berezovsky in '96 was on the level of Lee Atwater in '88, if you were not afraid of him, you were a fool.