After days of ever more ominous reports and rumors about the state of Boris Yeltsin's health, there were deep sighs of relief in the Kremlin last week when a panel of heart specialists declared that the President was healthy enough to have a heart bypass operation and had a good chance of total recovery. The operation would take place sometime in the next 10 weeks, his doctors announced, and after a couple of months' rest, Yeltsin would be back at work. The pronouncement seemed to reduce the threat of early elections or a constitutional crisis if the Russian lower house of parliament tried to have Yeltsin declared incapable of holding office.

But the fact remains that even in the rosiest scenario, Russia will have a part-time President for at least four months--very part time, limited by his doctors to no more than three working hours a day. And he will not be moving back to his Kremlin offices anytime soon. As he waits for the operation, he probably will divide his time between a suite of rooms at the Central Clinical Hospital and the presidential sanatorium at Barvikha, a village suburb once reserved for the Soviet ruling class but now available to anyone who has half a million dollars for what is fashionably known as a kottedzh (cottage).

The doctors' verdict was especially welcome news to Yeltsin's entourage. They had been under increasing fire for pushing a sick man to the limit--or letting him push himself--during this year's presidential campaign. A former presidential aide, Pavel Voshchanov, publicly accused his successors last week of sacrificing Yeltsin to their own political ambitions. But the report was welcome to Yeltsin deputies for a crasser political reason: it buys them time. In the days leading up to last week's medical announcement, pressure had been growing in the Russian media and parliament for Yeltsin to step down should his physicians conclude that an operation would be too dangerous. This would have been a political disaster for people like Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and the chief of the presidential staff, Anatoli Chubais. The two men are mostly political rivals these days, but they agree on one thing: their opposition to Alexander Lebed. His appointment as Secretary of the Security Council last June, after the first round of the presidential elections, seemed at the time a brilliant move: it brought over to the presidential camp a charismatic political figure and his 11 million votes. Since then, however, like Frankenstein's monster, Lebed has taken on a life of his own. An early presidential election would make the immensely popular Lebed the favorite to succeed Yeltsin. It would also give communist leader Gennadi Zyuganov a fighting chance of victory.

Lebed seemed unfazed and unimpressed by the plans for Yeltsin's operation. He has behaved recently as if the next presidential election campaign had actually begun. Last week, however, he was acting as if the campaign were over and he had won. Lebed marked his first 100 days in the Security Council with a round of interviews to influential Russian newspapers, a press conference and a series of apocalyptic statements. The country is on "the edge of an abyss," he told the press conference, and the army on the verge of mutiny. Yet the working of the government is so confused that "in the past 100 days I have yet to understand how decisions are made." He called on all parties and political movements to work with the Security Council to pull the country out of crisis. Lebed capped off the provocative statements on Saturday by suggesting that Yeltsin surrender his presidential powers pending his full recovery.

One of his possible allies turned out to be rather unexpected. Lieut. General Alexander Korzhakov, the former kgb officer who had been Yeltsin's faithful shadow, bodyguard and confidant until his dismissal last June, signaled political ambitions of his own in an interview to the mass-circulation daily Komsomolskaya Pravda. Asked whom he saw running the country after Yeltsin, he answered in one word, "Lebed." Lebed was almost as crisp in his public statements about Korzhakov. The man is a patriot, he declared; he had not discussed an alliance, "but I don't rule one out." The two would make strange allies. Last June they were on opposite sides in the confrontation that cost Korzhakov his job. Korzhakov and hard-line associates in the Kremlin were accused of trying to call off the second round of elections. Lebed, then newly appointed to the Security Council, declared that he would "cruelly" repress any attempts to short-circuit the political process. Korzhakov publicly advised him to calm down. The two men seem to have decided to forget this spat, and long before last June they may have been closer than anyone thought, drawn together by an animosity for a powerful common enemy: former Defense Minister Pavel Grachev.

A political alliance with Korzhakov would bring Lebed some rewards, but considerable risks. Korzhakov is thought to have built up a substantial fortune during his time in the Kremlin, and a Lebed presidential campaign would need a lot of money. Also, Korzhakov made clear in his interview last week that he had "compromising material" on current high officials in the Kremlin. Korzhakov did not name any names, but promised to release the material at the appropriate moment. It is widely assumed that his main target would be Chubais, Korzhakov's nemesis and no friend of Lebed. Chubais played a pivotal role in Yeltsin's re-election, and will almost certainly be a key player in the next round of presidential elections, whenever they happen.

But joining forces with Korzhakov could also harm Lebed, whose popularity is based on his image as a blunt, honest man of the people who can cut through the bureaucracy and get things done--the very image that Boris Yeltsin enjoyed during the heady years before illness and the isolation of the Kremlin turned him into a remote emperor. Korzhakov's image is the exact opposite: that of the shadowy, somewhat sinister political insider, a Rasputin who has profited from his calculating closeness to the center of power. A political alliance between the two men would end up tarnishing Lebed's image as an outsider immune to Kremlin corruption.

But Lebed has a tendency to lose friends as fast as he makes them, so any hopes for lasting political camaraderie with Korzhakov may turn out to be ephemeral. The more immediate concern is the impact the President's extended illness will have on Russia's already uncertain commercial and political futures. The leading Russian financial daily, Kommersant, was decidedly pessimistic last week. Yeltsin's pre-op and post-op absence will hold up key legislation, deter foreign investment and complicate painful issues, like the Chechnya settlement, the paper warned. The President's health crisis, Kommersant wrote, could bring to political and economic life a period of "profound stagnation." Those were the very words used to describe Leonid Brezhnev's waning, ailing last years.