PALE, RESTED AND READY

By JAMES O. JACKSON

SELDOM DURING HIS ALMOST FIVE years in power had Boris Yeltsin appeared more in charge. As cameras rolled in a Kremlin conference room, the glowering Russian President pounded the table and delivered a furious dressing down to a row of hangdog officers. "What am I to make of you generals?" he barked. "Are you playing games? What have you been doing instead of erecting barriers, strengthening your forces and stopping the rebels?" The generals--Defense Minister Pavel Grachev; Interior Minister Anatoli Kulikov; Andrei Nikolayev, the commander of the Border Guards; and Security Chief Mikhail Barsukov--sat in chastened silence, heads lowered, avoiding eye contact with their outraged commander in chief.

It was a vigorous Yeltsin, clearly recovered from his October heart trouble and just as clearly campaigning for the June 16 presidential elections, though he has yet to declare his candidacy. But even if he staged the event as a political-image make-over, Yeltsin had good reason to be angry. For the second time in eight months, guerrillas from rebellious Chechnya had carried out a terrorist raid on a civilian hospital. This time the attack was in Kizlyar, a town in Dagestan, a multiethnic republic in the Russian Federation three miles from the Chechen border. After killing 25 local residents and policemen and holding more than 3,000 terrified civilians in the town's hospital for 24 hours, some 250 rebels defied the Russian army by heading back to the border with 165 hostages, mostly women and children in a convoy of buses. By the end of the week, the raiders were holed up in the border village of Pervomayskaya, demanding that the Russian government guarantee them--as well as the hostages--safe conduct to Chechnya.

The raid came as Yeltsin was attempting to strengthen his political position following a two-month recovery in a clinic and a convalescent center. The 64-year-old leader had started to make a round of high-profile appearances: strolling in the Kremlin, laying ceremonial bricks for a cathedral and praying at an Orthodox Christmas Mass. He even flew to Paris in the midst of the hostage crisis to attend the funeral of Francois Mitterrand and demonstrate his fitness for office. "I am in perfect health," he told reporters. "I came here so everyone could see I was in perfect form." It was a startling contrast to the TV images of November that showed a visibly pale and wobbly Yeltsin going through the motions of meeting Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin.

"If I run in the elections," Yeltsin said last week, "it will be not for the sake of power but for the sake of Russia. I do not need power, but it is necessary to prevent a deviation from the [reform] path the country has taken." Since Russia's reformist future is clearly at risk from communists and nationalists, that statement provides a good indication that Yeltsin will be a candidate. The strongest challenge to the reformers comes from a restructured Communist Party that rose from oblivion to win the most votes in the Dec. 17 elections for the Duma, the national parliament. Although its 22% showing was not enough to control the Duma, it gave the party and its leader, Gennadi Zyuganov, a strong starting point in the race for the presidency--which is the real center of power in post-Soviet Russia.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the radical nationalist, formally announced his presidential candidacy last week with a 45-minute diatribe over the decline of Russia at the hands of "fifth columnists" who have rendered the nation "the most humiliated on the planet." Zhirinovsky has publicly advocated execution of criminals without trial and the forcible recovery of such former Russian possessions as Alaska and Finland. While his Russian Liberal Democratic Party did not do as well as expected in the Duma elections, it still finished second to the Communists.

Alexander Lebed, the heroic nationalist retired army general, also announced last week that he would run for the presidency. Lebed for now will be the candidate of a centrist nationalist group that did poorly in the election, the Congress of Russian Communities, but he is broadly popular as an individual. He hopes to win with the support of the millions of voters who are bitter over Russia's decline as a world power and disgusted with the corruption and chaos of postcommunist politics. "Who knows order," he asked, "better than a military man?"

Yeltsin recognized the power of nationalist resentment behind the Zhirinovsky and Lebed candidacies by accepting the resignation of his amiable Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, despised by nationalists and communists as a "Mr. Yes" of Western interests. The departure was long expected and a necessary part of Yeltsin's new campaign image. Not expected, however, was Yeltsin's decision last week to replace Kozyrev with Yevgeni Primakov, a wily Soviet-era bureaucrat who served most recently as head of the Foreign Intelligence Service. Liberal reformers had hoped for a bland career diplomat who would give offense to neither the West nor domestic hard-liners.

The choice of Primakov, however, was hardly to the West's liking. Under his leadership, the intelligence service in 1994 produced a report claiming that Russia must maintain a more aggressive profile rather than being subservient to the West, particularly on the issue of nato's expansion. And during the Gorbachev era, Primakov, a Kremlin foreign policy adviser at the time, angered U.S. Secretary of State James Baker by undermining his efforts to build a coalition to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. In his memoirs Baker called Primakov "a personal friend, and apologist, for Saddam Hussein." In Russia, by no coincidence, hard-line approval was as strong as Western dislike. Zhirinovsky called Primakov the "best possible choice," and Communist leader Zyuganov praised him as "an experienced and skilled statesman."

For all that, Yeltsin insisted Primakov's appointment "does not mean a change in the basic principles of Russia's foreign policy." That is true, primarily because Yeltsin will continue to run diplomacy. He has created a new Kremlin Foreign Policy Council on which Primakov is but one of several top officials. Still, Primakov is well schooled in the foreign policy thinking of the Soviet era, and his appointment alone creates a subtle shift away from the U.S. and toward more emphasis on the former republics of the Soviet Union that are Russia's immediate neighbors.

Russia's pernicious internal rebellion, however, is the most serious nettle for Yeltsin's presidential prospects. Thirteen months of war there has cost 30,000 lives, left 600,000 homeless and deeply undermined the public's confidence in both its politicians and its military leadership. With the new hostage crisis came television images of frightened, exhausted women and children peering from the shattered windows of rebel buses, all of which stoked Russians' anger about the war--and Yeltsin's inability to end it. The main point of his televised scolding of the generals was to deflect that discontent toward the uniformed military leaders. "The power structures, the ministries, the government and the Security Council have drawn few lessons from previous events," Yeltsin told them. That was taken to mean that top security and military officials are to be used as whipping boys.

Even if that quiets the immediate discontent, however, Chechnya is Yeltsin's weak point, and his challengers sense it. Lebed criticized the Kremlin's handling of the hostage crisis and warned that "there was no guarantee it won't happen again." In his declaration speech Zhirinovsky demanded, "End the war in the Caucasus! If you don't burn the rebels' bases with napalm, then you, Boris Nikolayevich, will lose the election on June 16, and I will do it on July 1!" Though crude, the threat contained a simple truth: the war in Chechnya mars any Yeltsin-image makeover, however impressive, and seriously hurts his chances for victory in June.

--Reported by John Kohan and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow

With reporting by John Kohan and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow