Death Trap

(4 of 5)

On Friday, Yeltsin took the unusual step of calling in TV and press photographers to record the opening few minutes of a Security Council session and put on a show to demonstrate that he was in command. It was not convincing. The President complained that his order of two days before "to end the bombardment of the capital of Chechnya was not fulfilled" and, looking straight at Grachev, rumbled: "I want to hear absolutely precise information from the Defense Minister." But Yeltsin also demanded that the Council set a date when police forces could take over from the army in Chechnya, as if the war could be ended by decree.

The day before, Yeltsin had met with his human-rights adviser, Sergei Kovalyov, and insisted, according to Kovalyov's account, that "I am receiving quite adequate information." Yeltsin denied the bombing of Grozny had continued after a Dec. 27 order that it stop -- until Kovalyov, who had just returned from Grozny, pointed out that he had eyewitnessed several subsequent air raids.

Small wonder, then, that more than a few analysts think Yeltsin is finished, whatever he does. Even in the Clinton Administration, which has clung to Yeltsin as the Bush Administration once stuck with Gorbachev, a muted debate is going on backstage as to whether that policy still makes sense. The official line is that it does: Yeltsin has bounced back many times before, and with all his faults he is still Russia's best hope for continued democratic $ reform -- at least in the sense that most potential successors would be worse.

But not all. According to an upbeat scenario, Yeltsin steps down and yields power to Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin. The new leader brings the war to an end by negotiating some sort of compromise, perhaps keeping Chechnya in the federation but giving it more autonomy under a new President and parliament to be chosen by internationally supervised free elections. Moscow has a reasonable claim that the Chechen government of President Jokhar Dudayev is illegal, having been installed three years ago by crooked elections. Chernomyrdin then calls new Russian presidential elections, and a grateful nation elects him on a platform of moderate reform.

Unfortunately, that sounds like a fanciful dream. A more likely prospect is a military-nationalist takeover. Moscow buzzes with rumors of plots and coups, nearly all by antidemocratic forces and nearly all casting Yeltsin as the victim, though a plausible alternative script calls for the President, despairing of any other way to stay in power, to dissolve parliament, cancel the 1996 elections and rule by decree. There is even a theory that a kind of creeping military plot is already well advanced. In this script, the army and its allies in the interior ministry and the intelligence services misled Yeltsin into launching a Chechnya war that they knew would backfire, and then deliberately botched the invasion besides -- all for the sake of discrediting the President so thoroughly as to make it easy for them to seize power in the name of restoring order. This idea seems very far-out, but the fact that it is put forward quite seriously by political gossips proves just how feverish and fearful the atmosphere in Moscow is.