RUSSIA'96: THE PEOPLE CHOOSE

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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."