Russian Roulette

What faith can anyone put in Boris Yeltsin's words? Five months ago, the Russian President said Viktor Chernomyrdin was not good enough to be Prime Minister and fired him. Last week he hired him back as the "heavyweight" who could save Russia from collapse.

The obvious conclusion is that neither Yeltsin nor Chernomyrdin nor any of the other figures spinning in and out of the government's revolving door have a firm plan to quell the economic and political chaos. And even if one did, he probably could not muster the political support to make his program stick. There is, at the...