Free Fall

When the Soviet Union was disintegrating during the late autumn of 1991, a band of disillusioned demonstrators gathered in Red Square. Bobbing along in their midst, under the shelter of the Kremlin's looming brick walls, was a placard that read 70 YEARS ON THE ROAD TO NOWHERE. The accusation was an angry and poignant truth. But then Russia was reborn under the old tricolor flag and set a new course toward not just reform but total transformation. And now, with the collapse of the economy and the paralysis of the government, that hopeful path has also run into a dead end. For Russians it has been seven more years on a road that has again led nowhere.

In many countries, the pitch of chaos Russia reached last week would have produced panic, fury, demonstrations, even riots. The street value of the ruble halved. Banks are tottering and closing, and the Moscow stock market has all but evaporated. The crash has shaken investors and governments around the world. But in Russia, home of the stolid and the depoliticized, the streets are calm and there is no sign of unrest. Russians are nervous and ask one another what is going to happen, but the only visible reaction is at the banks, where the relatively few citizens who trusted other people with their money have formed slow-moving and sometimes unruly lines. For the most part, ordinary people seem not merely restrained but numb.

In fact, the foreign reaction is more appropriate. What is happening in Russia is a disaster, a frightening one that threatens the world with prolonged instability at best, and the rise of an increasingly isolated and hostile state--armed with about 22,000 nuclear warheads--at worst. The Western countries have pumped tens of billions of dollars into the Russian economy to support reforms that were not carried through, and now are unlikely to give more. Russia is on its own.

Moscow has had no functioning government since Aug. 23, when President Boris Yeltsin dismissed his young Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko. His successor, acting Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, is under heavy pressure from the communist-dominated Duma. Parliamentarians are pushing aggressively for a greater say in running the country. Yelstin had kept them from real power but seemed prepared last weekend to surrender many of his presidential prerogatives. The communists have called for currency controls, re-nationalization and printing more rubles. On the weekend, however, Chernomyrdin went on TV to reassure Russia--and probably the West as well--that there would be no retreat from market economics. "We have already joined the world economy, and there will be no return to the past," he declared. The future, though, remains deeply uncertain.

Into this seething mess steps President Bill Clinton, whose two-day summit meeting with Yeltsin is scheduled to begin Tuesday. Neither President stood to gain much presidential luster from the meeting, since Yeltsin is politically moribund and Clinton is scandal-scarred and unable to offer the Russians serious assistance. U.S. officials fretted about the meeting until the last moment, wondering whether Yeltsin would still be in office when they arrived at the Kremlin, or whether he might quit as soon as they left.