THE NOWHERE MAN

By Paul Quinn-Judge

When Russians went to the polls on July 3, they voted for Boris Yeltsin for one reason: the hope that he could bring some normality into their chaotic lives. But Russia today seems as unsettled as ever. The economy again appears in deep trouble, the war in Chechnya has flared up after a brief campaign-induced lull, and the Communist-dominated parliament is again flexing its considerable political muscle. Instead of taking charge, Yeltsin has taken refuge at a sanatorium outside Moscow. He has left behind a team whose members are united largely by political expediency and spend more time jockeying for position than running the country.

Yeltsin's absence is deeply disconcerting. Despite his long history of mood swings, back pain, heart weakness and heavy drinking, his aides protest that nothing is wrong: Yeltsin, they insist, just needs a rest. Last week, however, a senior member of the new Yeltsin team, national security adviser Alexander Lebed, deviated from the reassuring official line. He told the Financial Times that Yeltsin was suffering from "moral, emotional and psychological exhaustion."

Sick or just tired, Yeltsin is due to emerge into the public eye on Aug. 9, the day he will be inaugurated--crowned might be a better word--in a sumptuous ceremony. The Order for Services to the Fatherland will be draped around his neck. Our President, a cantata commissioned for the occasion and performed by artists of the Bolshoi Theater, will urge Yeltsin to "bear the light of freedom down the years to the world."

That sentiment is more a feeble wish than a rational expectation. In Washington the State Department maintains, publicly at least, that Yeltsin is firmly in charge and overseeing the latest game of Kremlin musical chairs with some skill. In Moscow, however, his frequent disappearances reinforce the perception that the country has already entered the post-Yeltsin era, with the enfeebled President--like the Soviet-era leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Konstantin Chernenko--wielding power in name only. This in turn deepens the fear, often voiced in Western capitals and in Russia, that chaos in the Russian Federation is always lurking just below the surface of daily life. Even the top echelons of Russia's government are concerned. According to a source in the Defense Ministry, armed forces Chief of Staff General Mikhail Kolesnikov recently ordered plans to be drawn up to use troops to suppress any explosions of civil unrest.

Kolesnikov, the Defense Ministry source said, seemed particularly concerned about the danger of economic collapse. Other senior officials share this anxiety. The outspoken Lebed has warned publicly of an economic crisis coming later this year, triggered partly by Russia's tax-revenue problems--only 60% of taxes are being collected--and partly by serious problems in the nation's banking sector.

While some government officials insist such predictions are overly pessimistic, Andrei Illarionov, director of Moscow's Economic Analysis Institute, a reform-minded think tank, told a press conference last week that the coming year would be a tough one for the Russian economy. "What is in store for us," he predicted, "in terms of scale of the problem exceeds what we have faced in the past." Waiting in the wings for just such a doomsday scenario to come to pass are Russia's Communists, who have consoled themselves after defeat in the recent election by predicting that Yeltsin's victory will be short-lived. Come the fall, they say, the government's credibility will be wiped out by an economic collapse, and the continuing decline in Yeltsin's health will force a new election, in which they will be swept to power on a wave of public outrage.

While the Communists dream of power, those who wield it appear adrift, as a fin-de-regime cloud settles over the Kremlin and the maneuvering for power within intensifies. At least two members of the new Yeltsin team, Lebed and Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin, have obvious presidential ambitions and little love for each other. Lebed's aides in fact privately hint that Chernomyrdin will be a prime target of their planned anticorruption campaign. Both, however, are deeply wary of Anatoli Chubais, the new chief of the presidential staff. An ambitious, tough-minded proponent of privatization, Chubais in turn shares with his two rivals a strong antipathy toward General Alexander Korzhakov, who, though fired from his position as presidential security chief in June, remains one of Yeltsin's closest confidants and cannot be counted out.

Feuding aides and economic gloom are what helped wear down even a healthy Boris Yeltsin. Outstanding when faced with an all-or-nothing crisis, he has consistently been baffled and demoralized by the drudgery of daily governance. Now, in his twilight years, he has come eerily to resemble the description he once scornfully offered of his rival Mikhail Gorbachev: "a lover of half steps and half measures."

--Reported by Dean Fischer/Washington and John Kohan and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow

With reporting by DEAN FISCHER/WASHINGTON AND JOHN KOHAN AND YURI ZARAKHOVICH/MOSCOW