THE PEOPLE CHOOSE

By MICHAEL KRAMER/MOSCOW

This was clearly not what Boris Yeltsin expected. On May 3, a bright and unseasonably warm day, the President of Russia traveled about 160 miles northeast of Moscow to Yaroslavl, an industrial city known as part of the "golden ring" of ancient fortified towns that formed the historic heart of Russia. Before the 10-hour tour, Yeltsin's campaign handlers described Yaroslavl as "one of the nation's most stable" places, code for an area presumed sympathetic to Yeltsin. Yaroslavl was the first town outside the capital that he visited after the unsuccessful 1993 rebellion failed to dislodge him from the Kremlin. Back then, conditions in the city were improving after decades of shortages, but residents still remembered taking the four-hour "sausage train" to Moscow simply to purchase basic foodstuffs, and the old Soviet-era joke was retold regularly: "Do you have meat here?" a customer asks. "No," says the shopkeeper. "Here we don't have fish; it's at the other store that they don't have meat." Yeltsin was nevertheless the triumphant victor over revanchism, and in Yaroslavl that day he was hailed joyously.

Two and a half years later, with the shops well stocked and the streets clean, a fit and rested President assumed that a similar reception awaited him--and with it the chance to demonstrate his appeal beyond the reform-minded enclaves of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Instead Yeltsin was clobbered. From his first stop until his last, the cries went up--from an old woman wagging her finger in the President's face: "Yes, there's food in the stores, but who can afford it?"; from a young factory worker: "Where are our salaries?"; from a middle-aged electrician: "Our savings are worthless!" More quietly, a well-dressed man said, "All we ever get from you are promises, but nothing ever happens."

Complaints about crime, unemployment, corruption and the growing disparity between haves and have-nots rounded out the chorus of distress. By day's end Yeltsin appeared tired and beaten. He seemed to have been unaware of the passion of discontent outside Moscow, a city about as representative of Russia as New York is of America. Yeltsin himself is partly to blame for being so out of touch. Suffering from an apparently serious heart ailment, the man many Russians liken to a modern-day czar has for the past two years been a virtual Kremlin recluse. And his inner circle of aides, forever jockeying for position, seem to have concluded long ago that bearing bad news to their boss is the least career-enhancing service they can render. Given his insularity, the President's wide-eyed wonder at the pounding he took in Yaroslavl was not surprising. "The complaints here," a dejected Yeltsin told a local television interviewer, "they're everywhere. These weren't just single cases. The people complained en masse."

Russia votes on June 16. Eleven candidates are running for President--an office with near absolute power--but most observers view the race as between Yeltsin and his Communist rival, Gennadi Zyuganov. The stakes are enormous. "Nothing will prevent the forces that are dreaming of the past from introducing their own rules if they gain power," the President said of the Communists recently. That's right, says Valentin Kuptsov, first deputy chairman of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation: "The choice could not be greater. We will determine whether Russia is turned completely into a Western vassal controlled by the U.S. or reacquires its status as an independent, great power."

This is "one of those rare moments in history when a nation is undergoing a true social revolution," says Michael McFaul, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment Moscow Center. "It is not simply a transition-to-democracy situation, when both sides agree on the ultimate outcome and contest for the right to lead the way there. In Russia today both camps seek a zero-sum victory, with no consensus about or commitment to the new rules of the game in the wake of the ancient regime's collapse. Everything is at stake here, the entire political, economic and societal makeup of the nation."

Recent polls have shown Yeltsin pulling even with Zyuganov, or even slightly ahead, with the support of about a quarter of the electorate. If no candidate receives more than half the vote on June 16, a run-off between the two top finishers could be held as early as July 7. It is in the second round that Yeltsin hopes to win, as those scared that their past may become their future swallow their misgivings and vote for him. Yet even that mathematically plausible scenario is considered dicey. Talk of postponing the elections is the rage in Moscow, and serious observers wonder whether Yeltsin would--or should--yield power if he loses to Zyuganov.

These speculations gain currency almost daily as Yeltsin reaches for ever more apocalyptic "red scare" metaphors. When the President says, "I cannot let the forces of the past come to power; I will resist their comeback in every way," his aides nod in agreement. "I know what it would mean for your Western view of democracy," says Georgi Satarov, a top Yeltsin aide. "But if there were a chance that Hitler would come to power in America by winning an election, wouldn't you be wondering if it wasn't right to stop that?"

Why would a people so recently freed from totalitarian rule choose a course that could quickly lead to their renewed oppression? Part of the answer can be found in the abuse Yeltsin received in Yaroslavl. "A lot of Russians have come to identify various aspects of what we call reform not with a better future but with hardship," explains U.S. Deputy Secretary of State (and former TIME editor at large) Strobe Talbott, who oversees the Clinton Administration's Russia policy. "Crime and corruption are both broad based and deeply rooted," Talbott says. "They pose huge obstacles to Russia staying on a reformist course. [So] Russians tend to identify reform not only with hardship but with physical danger and gross inequity."

Besides these concrete problems, there is also the Russians' loss of psychological security. "If you were viewing Russia from Mars," says Yuli Guzman, a former liberal member of Russia's State Duma, "you would have to say life has got better in the last five years. But if people are living better in objective terms, their subjective sense is that things have got worse. Even those who have become rich and traveled the world have a hankering for the past, when you had the illusion that someone--whether Stalin, the party or your trade union leader--was always thinking of you, and your chunk of kolbasa was guaranteed, even if you had to stand in line for it."

But shouldn't freedom outweigh the drawbacks of reform? Not in Russia, which has no tradition of viewing freedom as a value. Alexander Yakovlev, who was a top adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet President, once put it this way: "We're not just trying to establish a reformed system. We're trying to dismantle the 1,000-year-old Russian paradigm of unfreedom." Trying--and perhaps failing once more. The words Ivan Turgenev wrote in The Dream more than a century ago, some years after Alexander II's decision to free the serfs, could apply today: "And once again after years I traverse your roads, And once again I find you, the same, unchanged!...And although you were freed from slavery, you do not know what to do with freedom."

In Russia today "freedom shock," to use Guzman's term, is explained succinctly by Roman, a 42-year-old taxi driver in Yaroslavl. "People have no concept of freedom," he says. "They substitute freedom of action for freedom of thought. They see freedom as license. They don't realize freedom requires self-discipline. They fear that freedom leads to anarchy. They view it as the ability, if one can, to lord it over those weaker than they are." This may explain why, in a survey of almost 2,500 Russians conducted in January by Richard Rose, a professor at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, 77% of respondents answered "order" when asked whether order or democracy was "more important for Russia now." Only 9% chose "democracy."

It is against this background that Boris Yeltsin seeks re-election. He has brought many of his difficulties upon himself--by allowing crime and corruption to flourish, by permitting privatization to enrich the few, by invading Chechnya. As a former Communist Party boss, he has always held suspect democratic credentials, and since 1993 he has undermined the establishment of democratic principles by his authoritarianism and his failure to build a party that would define and pursue those ideals. With his record working against him, Yeltsin has had to run against it--and, like Bill Clinton in the U.S., he is skillfully appropriating some hot issues of his opponents while demonizing them at the same time.

First, though, some vital preliminary work was undertaken. "Before we could make rational arguments, especially about the fear of communism," explains Satarov, "we had to deal with emotions." Yeltsin's approval rating was barely 5% in January. "We needed to awaken the lion by ending the President's invisibility," says Satarov. "We had to present him as a vigorous, active leader who has got the message and is trying his best." So Yeltsin, who at 65 has lived eight years longer than the average Russian male, went on a strict diet, lost 25 lbs., cut his intake of vodka and started making public appearances on a daily basis. The results were heartening. Six months ago, Yeltsin's negative ratings hovered around 80%. Today they're under 50%--enough to kill an American politician but good news for a candidate fighting to make a two-man run-off. "In January," says a Yeltsin aide, "the focus groups were awful. Four of the five top adjectives used to describe the President were 'drunk,' 'unhealthy,' 'can't be trusted' and 'not smart.' The only positive was 'experience.' Now only 'not smart' persists, and we can't change that." (Yes, Russian campaigns now use focus groups.)

After the image tune-up, Yeltsin tried for a while to defend his record, and the indexes of progress he listed were accurate: lower inflation, significant hard-currency reserves, a generally more open, demand-driven economy. When citing his achievements did not improve his standing, Yeltsin argued that the corner has been turned on austerity. "The most difficult period is over," he said as recently as last month. "We have survived. Don't lose hope." Each time he used that line, he was booed.

So Yeltsin turned to addressing some problems head on--by blaming others for them. In Russia especially, this is a traditional dodge. Since the czar is always right, the argument goes, any difficulties that arise are the result of unscrupulous or stupid subordinates who undermine him. Take, for example, the failure of the government to pay its civil servants for months at a time. A $10 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund has helped Yeltsin clean up some of the arrears, but the issue remains contentious. The blame for this shameful performance, the President zestily explains in a stump-speech staple, rests with his underlings.

On May Day in Moscow this year, Yeltsin urged trade unionists to help him "keep an eye" on the regional officials who had not yet distributed the funds he insisted had already been sent to them. In Yaroslavl two days later, he confidently announced nonpayment was not a problem in the surrounding province. "The governor is standing right here," Yeltsin said, "and he assures me the salaries have been paid." When the crowd cried, "No, no!"--an assessment later confirmed in several interviews--he ignored it.

Yeltsin uses another tactic to calm the anger he encounters--an immediate dispensation of funds. In the U.S. such pork-barrel spending is usually hidden in a maze of worthwhile legislation. In Russia, Yeltsin earmarks billions of rubles with abandon. In just the past several weeks he has signed a decree giving a $5 billion subsidy to farmers and has said commercial electricity rates will be cut in half. Those big items are ruinous enough, but Yeltsin's aversion to fiscal sanity goes further. In Yaroslavl, for example, he pledged $700,000 to house veterans of the Afghanistan war, $10,000 to help with the housekeeping costs at a convent of the Russian Orthodox Church, $20,000 to build a Muslim cultural center and $2 million for new barracks at a military college.

That last bit of largesse was classic Yeltsin. After reviewing the college's corps of cadets, the President had an aide yell the name "Panskov" across 50 yards of parade ground. Out of sight of his boss, Russian Finance Minister Vladimir Panskov rolled his eyes and shook his head. He knew what was coming. As some of Yeltsin's other aides snickered, Panskov rushed to the President's side. Thousands watched their animated conversation, after which Yeltsin proudly declared he had "found" the money for the new quarters. Panskov shuffled away, skulking--but more was in store.

At a tense meeting that afternoon with local officials and factory directors, Yeltsin dismissed Panskov's arguments and promised to reinstate a tax break for failing companies that had been removed last year under pressure from the IMF. "These people are trying to hide their profits and dodge taxes," Panskov pleaded in the open session. "They are telling us fairy tales. This move will bust the budget of the entire country." To which Yeltsin replied, "You can see that the government is against this. Now can any of you think of another way out?" When the audience shouted "No!", Yeltsin turned to Panskov and said proudly, "Before the election, let's submit a decree."

If buying votes is common the world over, so is the attempt of one politician to steal his rival's thunder. Yeltsin began his campaign by promising he would not "deviate from [his reforms] a single centimeter. A halt or any attempt to reverse them," he said ominously, "would deal a crushing blow to the country from which it might never recover." But the officials most closely associated with his reforms have been fired, and more than once Yeltsin has said he is still "for reforms, but not at any price; I am for correcting the course."

Yeltsin's moves toward the Communists' positions have gone far beyond his economic "course corrections." He jettisoned his Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, and abused him, in the same terms used by the opposition, as being too pro-Western. Yeltsin has also usurped a fair amount of nationalist, great-power rhetoric, and he has signed a treaty with Belarus that permits people to believe he favors re-creating the old Soviet empire (a Communist priority). Suddenly too the old World War II Red Army "victory banner" has been ordered flown alongside Russia's new white-blue-and-red tricolor on occasions commemorating that war.

Unfortunately for Yeltsin, his most important military adventure, the war in Chechnya, has been a disaster, and it is not viewed as a heroic defense of the Fatherland. At this point, the best the campaign can hope to do is neutralize the issue. "We'll settle for appearing serious about reaching an accommodation," says Satarov. "We want the country to understand this is not the kind of illness that can be treated quickly, but the President must be seen to be working the problem vigorously." It is all part of the larger theme, "Yeltsin is trying." Last week he ordered the country's army to abolish conscription by 2000 and, effective immediately, decreed that only soldiers who volunteer to go should be sent to battle zones such as Chechnya.

The Chechnya strategy also seems to have included killing the charismatic rebel leader, Jokhar Dudayev, a feat that was accomplished on April 21 when Russian electronic-warfare experts reportedly zeroed in on Dudayev's satellite phone and called in air strikes. Satarov won't directly confirm that the killing was timed to aid Yeltsin's campaign, but he gleefully acknowledges that "it wins votes for us." He also admits the Yeltsin campaign high command "discussed all this in advance" and knew when the killing would be attempted. He does, however, lament that "we haven't turned Dudayev's death to our complete advantage yet." That is why Yeltsin is planning to visit Chechnya soon, perhaps as early as this week; he wants to emphasize his readiness for talks.

To reach the second round, and to win, Yeltsin must unite the democratic opposition to Zyuganov, or at least dull its threat to his own candidacy. One often hears of an imminent deal in which Yeltsin's leading non-Communist opponents, Grigori Yavlinsky and Alexander Lebed, will drop their campaigns. Last week, though, Yeltsin and Yavlinsky had a public spat as talks about joining forces hit a bump. "He wants too much," said Yeltsin, at first referring to Yavlinsky's demands that he fire much of his Cabinet, but later the President decided he could "accept" many of them.

Yeltsin's aides have floated polls showing him far ahead of those men, but not far enough to forestall the possibility of Zyuganov's winning a majority in the first round. "None of those polls are accurate," concedes a Yeltsin adviser. "We have put them out to influence Yavlinsky and Lebed. They may still decide to continue their own campaigns, but we're confident now that at least they won't combine into a third-force coalition that could knock the President out of the box in the June 16 first round of voting."

Another irritant is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist whose appeal has consistently defied expectations. "But we're really not fighting hard to win this time," says Alexei Mitrofanov, a key Zhirinovsky aide. "The country isn't ready. The goal now is to grow like a cancer, to build our party at the grass roots and make Zhirinovsky more acceptable to the mainstream. Then, in five or 10 years, he could burst through."

To reassure those who fear his unpredictability, Zhirinovsky has gone out of his way to show that he is "just another politician and not a crazy nut," says Mitrofanov. How exactly? "By asking for the petty favors all politicians want." In Zhirinovsky's case, this meant meeting with Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin to request some specific goodies. According to Mitrofanov, Zhirinovsky asked for--and got--"a new car with a flashing blue light [to zip past Moscow's notorious traffic jams], a new dacha in the countryside, some special health cards for his family and one or two loans for some close friends."

In the end, says a Westerner who has been offering advice to the Yeltsin campaign, "this election will come down to a race between someone people hate and someone they fear." That means "never failing to remind them of what they stand to lose. Since Yeltsin can't win on his record, he must turn the question into what kind of future Russians want. There have been about 20 focus groups, and some of the polling is quite sophisticated," the adviser continues. "As in America, the battle is for the center. In Russia that's about 20% of the vote. They're the ones who'll decide it, and I really think that in the end they'll reject a return to communism."

So far, Yeltsin's advertising has been soft and squishy. Posters show happy children with Yeltsin, saying, "I love you; I have faith in you." At this point, says the adviser, "Yeltsin needs to be seen as above politics, as the President of all Russians. That's also why he won't debate Zyuganov--that and the fact that he'd be lousy at it. But the campaign won't go meekly all the way to the end. Some hard-hitting negative spots are in the can already, and those kinds of things work everywhere."

In directing the Yeltsin campaign, a major player is the President's 36-year-old daughter Tatiana Dachenko. A graduate of Moscow State University's computer-sciences department who worked with the Russian space program plotting the trajectories of docking spacecraft, Tatiana has little time these days to spend with her businessman husband and their two teenage boys. "The President trusts her almost alone to care for his interests above all else," says a Yeltsin adviser. "He's talked about blood ties being most important in a fight like this. In that sense, they're like Jack and Bobby Kennedy."

Ensconced on the 11th floor of Moscow's President Hotel, where the Yeltsin campaign has its offices, Tatiana is calling some of the key shots and signing off on some very American tactics. "She immediately grasped that sending 'truth squads' to taunt Zyuganov would appeal to Russians," says a Yeltsin adviser, "and she's championed the use of direct mail." The largest to date was a mailing three weeks ago to 3 million women veterans thanking them for their heroism and asking their forgiveness for the current economic hardships. Each was signed by Yeltsin (albeit by autopen) and individually addressed to the women. In the U.S., where voters are inundated by such mailings, they are mostly ignored. In Russia they've been heartily welcomed.

These tactics are partly designed to compensate for Yeltsin's lack of organization. While the Communists retain a hard core of 500,000 committed members divided among hierarchical cells, Yeltsin has no political party and nothing resembling so spirited a corps of campaign workers. Instead he has regional administrators who he hopes will deliver on election day. But many of these local officials have proved lackluster. Indeed, they failed miserably last December, when the Communists and their allies won a plurality of seats in the parliament.

By American standards, many of the Yeltsin campaign's tactics are pretty crude--and none more so than God Forbid, a six-page newspaper warning of dire consequences if Zyuganov wins. On the front page of the first issue, which has already flooded 10 million Russian homes, a fabricated plea from Stacy Edwards urges voters to choose Yeltsin over the Communists. Edwards plays Holly on Santa Barbara, an American soap opera widely watched on Russian television. Inside, a full-page color photo portraying Zyuganov has been retouched to show him in a surgical gown, holding a sickle poised to slice into two eggs. In Russian the word for eggs is also slang for testicles.

The Yeltsin campaign denies involvement with God Forbid, but TIME has obtained a directive from the government agency responsible for distributing all printed matter in Russia that describes how the paper should be handled. It also "draws your attention to the fact that local representatives of the client will supervise control over the delivery of this newspaper," a rather unsubtle hint that Yeltsin's lackeys will be watching.

In ticking off all that he has done to improve Russian life, Yeltsin never fails to mention that "we already have free television, free radio and a free press." And what a free press it is! In February, Yeltsin fired the head of Russian state television and radio, whom the President perceived as too critical. Since then, Russia's TV news has become an unapologetic Yeltsin booster. Zyuganov rightly rants about the lack of coverage, but he does get some--all of it negative. Meanwhile, day after day, Russian television reports on Yeltsin glowingly. The President's Yaroslavl visit, for instance, was presented as a triumph rather than a disaster, and Yeltsin's revealing remarks to the city's local TV station weren't covered at all.

"I make no bones about what we're doing," says Nikolai Svanidze, a popular news anchor. "Zyuganov says the press must be in line with the society, which means government control if he gets in. We have no right to be objective now." As a tactical matter, Svanidze says, "frontally saying Zyuganov is bad would be counterproductive. So we coordinate with Yeltsin's staff and make sure to use good camera angles when showing the President. I'd like to show him drunk, but not now. Honesty will have to wait till later."

Gennadi Zyuganov's great achievement has been broadening his Communist base to include many who oppose Yeltsin's reforms, including "national patriots" who yearn for the empire's restoration, hard-line Bolsheviks who idolize Stalin, red capitalists who own casinos in Moscow, and "social-democratic" intellectuals. "Creating that coalition was our first priority, and it is why we never refer to Zyuganov as the Communist candidate," says Valentin Kuptsov, Zyuganov's campaign manager and Communist Party deputy. But "Zyuganov is not merely a tactical nationalist," says James Billington, a Russia scholar and currently the U.S. Librarian of Congress. "He is a believer in a form of nationalism replete with conspiracy theories, internal scapegoats and external enemies."

Zyuganov can be enigmatic and vague when it suits his purposes, but his books and articles reveal a moral absolutist who sees Russia in a death struggle with the U.S. When George Bush spoke of a new world order, Zyuganov labeled the idea "geopolitical sabotage," nothing but a plot to "establish the West's global supremacy." Capitalism, Zyuganov has written, "doesn't fit in our flesh and blood, in our everyday life, in our habits and in the mentality of our society."

Listen carefully to Zyuganov on the stump, and you hear more of the same--the old-time Communist religion fraught with a virulent anti-Americanism, a longing for Russia to be treated once again with respect as a great power and constant reminders that Yeltsin's reforms have worked only for a few, the class called New Russians who own Mercedes and patronize expensive restaurants and nightclubs. "Russians have only three rights today," Zyuganov routinely intones in a surefire applause line: "The right to steal, the right to drink and the right not to be responsible."

A large part of Zyuganov's time is spent managing his unruly coalition. Whenever he says anything even mildly soft-line, his hard-core colleagues recoil. "We have an agreement allowing us to run Zyuganov free of the old dogma, to give him room to maneuver," says Kuptsov. "But there are always tensions in so large a coalition." That is perhaps why Zyuganov so often looks uncomfortable at his own rallies. When backers like Victor Anpilov, a rabble-rouser, promise to fight "to the last ounce of blood" to restore the old order, you can almost see Zyuganov wince.

Such talk clashes with the effort to have Zyuganov appear as a reasonable person who wouldn't dream of wrenching the nation back to a past so many revile. "We won't try to renationalize everything," says Zyuganov, ignoring his own party platform. "That could lead to civil war." But, he invariably adds, we would "of course consider" renationalizing those concerns that have been "privatized illegally." All of this is part of the Zyuganov two-step. He rants against capitalism and the West before audiences nostalgic for the Soviet Union--and tamps down the fire when he talks to moderates.

As Yeltsin knows better than anyone else, the centrist voters are key, and Kuptsov thinks Zyuganov has the edge in capturing them. "We should win, because more of those people are hurting economically than have managed to get rich," he says. Kuptsov sees the electoral math of a runoff like this: "Yavlinsky's support will split 60% for Yeltsin; we'll get 80% of Lebed's followers and 70% of Zhirinovsky's. The rest will be shared about equally." Agrees Andrei Kozyrev, Yeltsin's former Foreign Minister: "I'm afraid that might be exactly right."

The real key to Zyuganov's campaign, however, is not his careful positioning. Rather, it is the old-fashioned political organization he commands. Instructions from Kuptsov's office are rocketed daily to Communist cadres nationwide, and compliance is monitored carefully. "Our mode of work is what it has always been," says Kuptsov, "especially now, when we are frozen out of the media. We rely on word-of-mouth, on the kind of door-to-door hard work we've always been good at." As an example of the organization's brute strength and savvy, Kuptsov offers this: "When it came time to collect the required 1 million signatures to become a candidate, Yeltsin gathered 1.4 million, but we went out and got 7 million. Why? Because we used the signature-collection process as a legitimate excuse to visit in people's homes beyond our Communist base. It was a chance to get people to get to know us, to help them not be afraid of us, as Yeltsin wants them to be."

Ivan Morozov, a Communist Party district leader in Yaroslavl, is a typical lieutenant in Zyuganov's ground war. "We work through factory people and teachers who are Communists," he says. "A lot of what we do is illegal. We're not supposed to push Zyuganov in the workplace or in schools, but we do it anyway. And we're training people to be at the polls to guard against Yeltsin's cheating."

Zyuganov can't be everywhere at once, so more than 200 designated surrogates prowl the country touting his virtues. There are also scores of affinity groups, like Veterans for Zyuganov, Farmers for Zyuganov and Factory Workers for Zyuganov. It's all low-budget, but the message is intense, and stripped of flourishes, it is always the same: As Yeltsin seeks to scare voters about a Communist future, the Zyuganov coalition seeks to keep the focus on Yeltsin's failures. "It could work," says Anatoli Chubais, the architect of Yeltsin's privatization program. "The real standard of living is so low that many Russians are desperate to believe in anyone who promises them a better life."

With Chubais' worry in mind, some of those close to Yeltsin have publicly called for the election's postponement. Given such comments from the likes of Alexander Korzhakov, chief of the President's security staff, and Leonti Kuznetsov, Moscow's military district commander, many fear that a serious signal has been sent. Yeltsin has forthrightly quashed such speculation, but Zyuganov won the round by appearing thoughtful and nonthreatening. "I am for the law, and the law calls for elections," Zyuganov said almost immediately after Korzhakov's remarks.

Satarov, the President's aide, denies that Yeltsin sanctioned Korzhakov's comments. "We're way too far down the road for that," Satarov says. But the next dire scenario has Yeltsin moving to invalidate the vote after it takes place. Russia's election law is filled with loopholes, and an Interior Ministry official says Yeltsin could contest the results for months. And then what? If he is serious about "never" letting the Communists come to power, says this official, then the only option would be armed confrontation.

In such a crisis Yeltsin could not count on the military's support. "Unlike in the past," says Satarov, "when the President was popular and so the army sided with him, I'm not at all sure what they would do in such a circumstance." Kozyrev believes the outcome could be a twofold victory for the army. "They don't like the President and would like to be rid of him," he says. "If he loses the election, they could see him gone while at the same time appearing as defenders of the people's will."

Gorbachev, who is also running in the election, says Yeltsin is "too weak" to fight and that "he will accept the result, whatever it is, if only to secure his place in history." Gorbachev is less worried about Zyuganov than about those around him: "If Russia's Communists had evolved as their Central and East European colleagues have, if they were really social democrats, then there would be no reason to worry about Zyuganov's coming to power," says Gorbachev. "But Russia's Communists want a strict Stalinism. If Zyuganov resists them, he could be pushed aside just as I was."

Russia today is a postcommunist, not a democratic society--and that is partly Yeltsin's fault. He is the only politician of sufficient stature in the post-Soviet period who could have created an "anticommunist" party committed to reform. Instead he chose a politics of charisma, believing his populist appeal would be more effective in ensuring support for reform than would the enlistment of local activists to promote his views. By allowing reform to become identified with one powerful personality--his own--Yeltsin failed to create a constituency for change that could survive if he became unpopular. And now that he has become deeply unpopular, the cause of democracy and reform has suffered accordingly.

Over the years, as he has become more and more dictatorial, the notion of Yeltsin as embodying democracy has receded, and now no one can say for sure which policies he would actually pursue in a second term. Yegor Gaidar, the former Prime Minister who lost his job in Yeltsin's purge of Western-leaning officials, is only one who says he is "not persuaded that the President will promote liberal reform" if he is returned to office. Indeed, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's gloomy observation of two years ago seems even more apt: "The system that governs us is a combination of the old nomenklatura, the sharks of finance, false democrats and the kgb. I cannot call this democracy...and we do not know in which direction it will develop."

Yet it is surely true that with Yeltsin, the space for democracy and market reform that is growing fitfully almost everywhere in Russia will have a better chance of succeeding peacefully and more quickly than if Zyuganov takes power. For besides his economic changes, Yeltsin's true legacy thus far has been his acquiescence in the decentralization of power. "It has shifted dramatically downward from the Kremlin and outward from Moscow," says Strobe Talbott. The result is that Russia is fast becoming a pluralistic nation, but it has yet to make the transition to a civil society.

If, in the short run, only a fool would be optimistic about Russia's course, the eventual outcome seems favorable. As Gorbachev says, "Only the old are truly Communists now. When the young take over, communism will finally die, and democracy will take firm root." So while few deny that a period of repressive score settling would attend a Communist victory, the grass that is already growing through the cracks will continue to do so in any event. It is right to view this election as among the most pivotal in history. The question, though, is no longer whether Russia's future will arrive, but when it will--and, if the Communists re-emerge, exactly how many innocents will have to suffer needlessly until it does.

--With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly, John Kohan and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow and Dean Fischer/Washington

With reporting by SALLY B. DONNELLY, JOHN KOHAN AND YURI ZARAKHOVICH/MOSCOW AND DEAN FISCHER/WASHINGTON