DEMOCRACY IN A WHIRL

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Times have changed since the 49-year-old lawyer and his misnamed Liberal Democratic Party exploded onto the Russian political scene with a sensational 22.9% of the vote in the December 1993 parliamentary elections. Now, after two years of his bad-boy antics, the Russian electorate appears to be growing weary of Zhirinovsky. Although he can count on enough support from his solid following among the lumpen proletariat to remain a disturbing force in the new parliament, he will have to share the protest vote that brought him to power in 1993 with Lebed, former Vice President Alexander Rutskoi and a host of other patriotic-minded candidates who did not--or could not--run in the last elections. GENNADI ZYUGANOV Riding a Wave of Nostalgia

Standing in front of a huge bust of Vladimir Lenin, Communist Party leader Zyuganov, 51, sounds very much like the teacher he once was as he cites fact and figure on Russia's economic and social woes at a campaign rally in the rural Russian city of Kaluga. The situation in Russia, he says, is "a catastrophe worse than the invasions of the Tatars, Napoleon and Hitler combined." The mostly over-50 crowd, packed into the "culture palace" of a factory, constantly interrupts Zyuganov with applause, especially when he takes a gibe at Yeltsin and wonders out loud "why you have to be sober to drive a bus but not to run the country."

Zyuganov is more flexible about following the old party line than most of his followers, but even if their leader may sometimes sound like a Social Democrat, Russia's half a million communists today represent the most hard-line core of the party that once had 18 million members. If voters need any reminding of communism's horrors, the "Forward, Russia!" party of economist Boris Fyodorov has put up a huge poster in Moscow reading: 50 MILLION VICTIMS OF CIVIL WAR, COLLECTIVIZATION AND REPRESSION WOULD NOT VOTE FOR ZYUGANOV. The trouble for Yeltsin and Russia's beleaguered reformers is that on Dec. 17, much of the electorate probably will.