THE YELTSIN SURGE

Comeback kid does not translate well into Russian, but it fits Boris Yeltsin like his own blue suit. As 1996 began, the Russian President seemed out of it, unlikely even to survive the first round of voting that 11 candidates will face next Sunday. He was ailing, unsteady on his feet, glassy-eyed. His leadership and his policies looked just as moribund. His approval ratings moldered in the single digits, and his ambition to run for another term in the Kremlin seemed pointless.

Just look at him now. He is a campaigning dreadnought, wading into crowds from the black-earth zone of European Russia to Siberian forests, microphone in hand, bantering, pledging, urging. Wooing the youth vote in Ufa two weeks ago, his cheeks glowing, Yeltsin danced at a free rock concert, bellowing to thousands of Generation Xers, "Vote! Vote, or you'll damn well lose it all." At a state farm near Tver last week he promised workers, as he has everywhere, that he would pay their back salaries. "I'll give you the money, now that you have cornered me," he vowed. "But will you support me?"

Money, Yeltsin has discovered, talks. He has made so many similar promises to workers, teachers, soldiers and pensioners that last week he had to order Russia's disapproving central bank to fork over $1 billion to help pay for it all. In the past five weeks Yeltsin's appeal, according to most of Russia's unreliable opinion polls, has climbed steadily to equal or overtake his rivals'.

As Russia's epochal presidential campaign comes down to the voters, Yeltsin has managed to turn a contest on the fate of democratic reform into a two-man race with his main challenger, Communist Party leader Gennadi Zyuganov. After weeks of extraordinary, exuberant stumping and an unprecedented media blitz, Yeltsin the populist politician has been reborn, while some of the gas has gone out of the stolid Zyuganov's gloom-and-doom campaign. With nine other candidates in the race, neither of the front runners is expected to win outright--50% plus one--in the first round, but there is little doubt that they will face each other in a runoff in July.

Russians are a cynical lot, though, and a pervasive air of distrust clouds the entire enterprise. The Communists have been feeding voters dark tales of conspiracy, and even Yeltsin's supporters believe he will not allow himself to lose. By fair means or foul, citizens predict, Yeltsin is the present and future President. Of course if Zyuganov wins, Russians will also say he cheated. And whoever loses will charge the other with fraud.

The closeness of the contest has thrown the Communist candidate onto the defensive. Last week Zyuganov headed for Siberia, shunning critics in the big cities for the reassuring applause of the "red and passionate" in the remote Far East. There he wins heady applause from his natural constituency of pensioners and those left out of the new, rambunctious Russian society, who share his visions of impending apocalypse and lap up communism's promise to restore a mythic past of civil order and financial security.