The dead man grasps the living. The corpse of the old world is
decomposing among us, poisoning everything alive. That corpse stinks!
--V.I. Lenin

It may be autumn, but metaphorically it seems to be springtime in
Russia once again. Boris Yeltsin is back, in fighting form, after an
eight month absence due to heart surgery and subsequent pneumonia. He
has given a free hand to Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov, who were
installed in March as first deputy prime ministers with a mandate to
revive market reform. These two men are the sort of politicians
Western observers like to see at the helm in Moscow--young,
forty-something technocrats who are healthy, telegenic, and fluent
both in English and in the language of IMF stabilization programs. It
is 1992 all over again: what some Russian commentators are calling
"the second liberal revolution." International markets are
enthusiastic, and money is pouring into Russian shares and bonds at
the rate of $1.5 billion a month. The Moscow stock exchange has risen
150 percent since the beginning of the year.

It may, however, be a little premature to sink one's life savings
into Novgorod municipal bonds. Western attitudes toward Russia over
the past decade have oscillated between brief interludes of elation
and dire predictions of chaos and doom. The heady optimism of 1992
was followed by the anxiety of 1993 (the shelling of the parliament)
and the fears of 1994 (the war over Chechnya). The market transition
in Russia has also been accompanied by increased poverty, rising
death rates, and an explosion of violent crime. Contract killings in
Moscow alone are running at three hundred a year. Anyone lulled into
a state of euphoria by reading an IMF or World Bank report on
Russia's imminent economic boom would be well advised to see the
recent movie, The Saint, in which Val Kilmer is chased across Moscow
by a menagerie of gangsters who have bought off the city's police and
army units and whose boss is running for president. Which is the real
Russia--the Russia of sleek bankers, oil millionaires, and
Weimar-style cabarets; or the Russia of starving babushkas, reeling
drunks, and suicidal soldiers? For once, Hollywood may have stumbled
upon a more accurate rendition of Russia's highly contradictory
social reality than that reflected in the bullish projections of
financial markets.

Hollywood aside, there are some trends in contemporary Russia that
should be applauded. There is no sign that the average Russian--even
one suffering from wage or pension arrears--thinks that a return to
the authoritarian Soviet past is either feasible or desirable. A
basic acceptance of the institutions of democracy and a market
economy has taken root both among the ruling elite and the population
at large. For all its problems, Russia does not currently feel like a
society on the brink of social catastrophe. Market democracy is weak,
but the forces that would topple it are weaker still. Radical
communists find it hard to mobilize more than a few thousand people
on the streets, and for all the talk of "Weimar Russia", the
neo-fascist movements only have a few hundred serious followers. The
historical record suggests that the major threat to developing
democracies is a military coup, but Russian generals seem more
interested in building dachas (and subsequently keeping themselves
out of jail) than repeating the sorry experiences of August 1991 and
October 1993--when the army was dragged into politics by ambitious or
fearful civilian leaders. As one commentator put it, "The army is as
defenseless in the face of democracy as it was in the face of the
totalitarian state. When the hard times came the people with weapons
accepted their poverty more meekly than the teachers with their chalk
or the miners with their picks."

Both positive and negative trends in Russia are much obscured by the
West's fixation on the personality and power of Boris Yeltsin. Too
much of Western energy, resources, and political capital has been
sunk into schemes whose primary goal is propping up Yeltsin's regime,
while far too little attention has been devoted to listening to what
Russians themselves want and need. Trends in Russia since 1991 have
been highly contradictory. In some respects the country has changed
faster than one would have expected, in other respects more slowly.
Unfortunately, journalists dislike ambiguity, and in the public mind
the fate of Russia seems to have been irrevocably tied to the rise
and fall of Yeltsin's fortunes.

This means, in turn, that some important trends of the past six
years, such as the ebbing of power away from Moscow to the provinces,
are seen as negative rather than positive developments, since they
undermine Yeltsin's power and authority. But the federalization of
Russia is arguably a healthy political development, since it lessens
the likelihood of unpredictable and potentially disruptive policy
switches at the national level. Moscow now has to look over its
shoulder at how the leaders of Russia's eighty-nine regions will
react. The autonomy of regional governors was strengthened by the
round of elections that took place last fall (before which most of
them had been appointed directly by President Yeltsin). The enhanced
power of regional leaders compensates to some degree for the
pusillanimity of the legislative and judicial branches of government
at the national level. For many Western commentators, however, these
regional governors are seen as obstacles to the reformist drive that
has been launched by Yeltsin's rejuvenated government.

The optimism of Russia-watchers about the reformist zeal of the
Chubais-Nemtsov team is all the more surprising given that just a
year earlier, in the spring of 1996, the West was staring bleakly at
the prospect of a Red Restoration. The Communist Party was the
biggest winner in the December 1995 State Duma elections, and
Yeltsin's personal popularity rating was "lower than grass", as
Chubais put it. The Russian state was mired in a bloody, senseless
war in Chechnya, while its workers and pensioners went unpaid. (It is
often forgotten that Chubais was fired from his post as first deputy
prime minister in January 1996 in part because of his inability to
pay off wage and pension arrears.) And now? The war in Chechnya is
over, Russia has brokered its problems with NATO expansion, and the
sinister "party of war" (Yeltsin's clique of hardline advisers) has
been pushed out of office. Economic reform is back on track, and the
Dynamic Duo of Chubais and Nemtsov are preparing to do battle with
the dinosaurs of the old Soviet economy--the energy monopolies--and
to bring the bracing winds of reform to housing and social welfare.

So the story goes. The reality, however, does not fit this glossy
image of reformist Russia, which has been artfully buffed by Western
financiers keen to sell bonds to emerging market investors. The new
government is unlikely to do anything that will reverse Russia's
steady decline into a minor regional power with Third World living
standards (and 20,000 nuclear weapons). The Deng Xiaoping model of a
passive, near-dead leader presiding over a delicate balance of
political forces may have worked well in China, but it is not working
in Russia, whose socialist economy was more developed than China's,
and so requires more radical surgery to repair. Six years into the
transition, that economy remains woefully anemic. The formulas that
have succeeded in most of Eastern Europe have fallen on stony ground
in the former Soviet Union--the Baltic countries excepted. Elsewhere,
economic growth kicked in six months after inflation was brought
below 5 percent per month. It has now been two years since this was
accomplished in Russia, yet the economy continues to decline for its
seventh consecutive year.

Russia's economic problems lie not so much in the economic formulas
as in the political failure to implement them. And implementation has
faltered not because of strong social opposition, but because of a
failure of political leadership. That failure is encapsulated in the
person of Yeltsin and his on-off approach to economic reform, in
which policy is subordinated to the President's moods and his
oscillating calculations of political expediency. Yeltsin is not the
solution, he is the problem. And he is the problem because he is the
state.

Ends and Means

The Russian state that emerged after 1991 was built around the figure
of Boris Yeltsin, an ex-Communist apparatchik who understood the old
system well enough to keep power out of the hands of the Communist
Party. He played an important balancing role, promoting democracy and
cautious economic reform in a country where the social bases for such
politics were slim to nonexistent. Yeltsin did this by surrounding
himself with officials of differing views and backgrounds, who were
united only by their dependence on him. This balancing of rival
forces in the interest of preserving power is the essence of
Yeltsin's political style. Former U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock has
described how Yeltsin drew him a diagram of a circle with spokes
radiating from its center and said, "That way I can use them when I
wish, but they don't control me or speak for me."

There is no doubt that Yeltsin's political skills saved Russia from
catastrophe in 1991. He saw that the old system was finished, and
quickly set about concentrating power in his own hands in order to
provide a credible alternative leadership and thereby stave off civil
war. However, having steered Russia through the collapse of the
Soviet Union, Yeltsin was reluctant to leave the helm, or to share
power with his former allies in the Russian legislature. In a
dramatic about-face, Yeltsin unleashed the army on the Supreme Soviet
in October 1993--the very parliament from which he had faced down the
August 1991 coup. December 1993 saw the adoption of a new
constitution that stripped the legislature of most of its power and
concentrated authority in the hands of the president. Raising the
specter of civil war proved handy again in 1996, since it provided
Yeltsin with a campaign theme that proved sufficient to beat off the
lackluster challenge from Communist Gennady Zyuganov in the
presidential election. Yeltsin's political style is clearly effective
when it comes to concentrating power in his own hands, but it is
incapable of generating effective policies to tackle the acute
domestic and international problems facing Russia.

The principle underlying Yeltsin's style of government is simple and
familiar: "L'état, c'est moi." Boris Nemtsov, the current trailblazer
for democracy in Russia, habitually refers to Yeltsin as the
"Czar-father", apparently without irony. Western leaders went along
with Yeltsin's consolidation of power for lack of an obvious
alternative, showing the same political foresight that brought us
such outstanding leaders as Shah Mohammed Reza and Mobutu Sese Seko.
Such "strong" leaders may be able to sustain political stability for
decades--but when they are toppled, they leave a society in ruins.

Western advisers who have been paid to promote democracy and the rule
of law have been strangely silent about the weak powers granted to
the Russian parliament. Their rationale seems to be the following: If
the Russian voters throw up a legislature full of communists,
nationalists, and other ne'er-do-wells, as they did in 1993 and 1995,
that is all the more reason to stick with Yeltsin. This attitude is
wrong on three counts. First, Russia will never develop an effective
parliament unless it becomes a source of real power, and is held
accountable to electors for its decisions. At the moment, the
parliamentary deputies have no incentive to behave responsibly, but
can sit back and blame Yeltsin for the country's ills. Second,
although the Russian legislature is indeed a sorry and fractious
institution, nobody ever said that parliamentarians are saints. On
the contrary, democracy is built on the assumption that one's rulers
are not perfect. (Is there any legislature on earth that generates
warm, protective feelings among the people who observe its antics?)
That is why there must be institutional checks and balances, and a
maximum of public visibility and accountability in the decision
making process. Third, the doomsayers exaggerate the grip of the
Red-Brown coalition on the parliament. Through both the 1993 and 1995
elections, the bloc of voters supporting broadly pro-reform
candidates stayed about the same--around 40 percent of the
electorate. Due to the vagaries of the proportional representation
system and the fractiousness of the democratic parties, the reformers
failed to capitalize on their solid base of public support. But there
was a moderate presence in the parliament, one that could have grown
over time had it been given a chance. Yeltsin himself did nothing to
promote the development of an effective democratic party, instead
refusing to join any party and pretending that the president should
be "above politics."

Many Russians initially went along with the concentration of power in
Yeltsin's hands, partly because they believed it more suited to
Russia's political culture, and partly because they misunderstood the
role of the president in the U.S. political system. Many Russians
(and East Europeans, too) believe that the president of the United
States is an all-powerful figure, and would be shocked to learn of
the important role played by Congress in domestic and foreign policy.

Above all, the reformers themselves justified their allegiance to
Yeltsin by arguing that the end justifies the means. They had no
illusions about the undemocratic nature of Yeltsin's regime, but
maintained that Russia was at a crucial crossroads. Someone had to
take responsibility for dismantling the remaining institutions of the
Soviet era, and for laying the foundations for a market economy and
civil society. Yeltsin at least understood the need for fundamental
change. He was willing to give his young reformers sufficient
autonomy to pursue radical policies that would be costly in the short
term but essential to Russia's long-term well-being. The implicit
bargain made by such reformers was subjected to an acid test by the
Chechen war. Only the most hardened pragmatists were willing to
continue supporting an administration that caused the death of some
40,000 civilians.

The problem with the reasoning of these pragmatists--a problem that
should be more clearly understood by survivors of the Soviet regime
than by anyone else--is that ends can never be separated from means.
Market reform imposed from above is likely to alienate the social
groups and bureaucratic agencies whose cooperation is essential to
the creation of effective social institutions. Democracy is precisely
about the priority of means over ends, since it rests on the belief
that agreement cannot be reached over ends unless a sound
deliberative process is in place. Yeltsin does not seek a dialogue
with society: he seeks to browbeat it into compliance with his
populist rhetoric.

The pragmatist approach also makes heroic assumptions about the
integrity and ability of the governing elite, and asks us to suspend
Lord Acton's dictum about the tendency of power to corrupt.
Corruption may be rife among top government officials, but even so it
is not the crucial problem. Ordinary Russians expect their leaders to
steal--it helps them rationalize their own efforts to cheat the
authorities. What matters, to paraphrase Deng Xiaoping, is not
whether the cat will go to heaven, but whether it can catch mice.
Unfortunately, the Russian state, even with the young reformers at
the helm, is doing a lousy job at catching mice.

Much of the government's economic policy is now being formulated by a
team of two dozen men in their thirties and forties, a team that
Gennady Zyuganov refers to as the "pedocrats" (meaning those
representing "rule by children"). The new vice president of the
national electricity company, for example, is twenty-nine year old
Boris Brevnov, who set up his own bank at age twenty-three. The
pedocrats' accession to power in March of this year represents a
miniature "cultural revolution"--a revolution that took place without
an election, without any pretense of asking the society if it wanted
another dose of liberal reforms. A lot of the new team's policy seems
to be based on IMF and World Bank briefing papers and occasional
readings of The Economist. Even assuming they are honest and capable,
the capacity of these young revolutionaries to design and implement
effective policies, in the face of the indifference or hostility of
other civil servants and key political and economic elites, must be
in grave doubt. Only the promotion of Nemtsov from the provinces
represents an exceptional development; for most of the past six
years, Yeltsin has been "endlessly reshuffling the same stale pack of
cards" in selecting his ministers, and as such the Nemtsov-Chubais
team remains an embattled minority.

There are of course plenty of critics prepared to argue that the
young reformers are not driven by altruism, but are trying to "become
the sole wielders, the monopoly-holders, of economic, financial,
informational, and political power in Russia." Either way, and
whether they succeed in the main or not, it suits Yeltsin to draft in
a fresh new governmental team every year or so: It is a straw for
optimists to cling to, and it ensures a supply of scapegoats when
things go wrong.

But "L'état, c'est moi" is an idea whose time has passed--about two
hundred years ago. There is only one political institution that has
proved itself capable of aggregating social interests in such a way
as to provide social peace and guarantee individual liberty while
promoting economic prosperity, and that is an elected legislature. It
is instructive to note that all the Central and East European
countries that have pursued successful reforms have strong, effective
parliaments. In contrast, it is hard to find a single country in
transition with an overly powerful presidency that has achieved
lasting economic recovery.

Yeltsin would have best served Russia by stepping down from power in
1993 or 1994 and passing on the baton of leadership to a new
generation. Instead, in the tradition of previous Russian rulers, he
doggedly clings to power. He even opted to run for a second term in
1996 despite the fact that his public support stood at a mere 8
percent in January of that year. Thanks to the massive and one-sided
media campaign waged on his behalf, and with Zyuganov as his
principal opponent, Yeltsin was able to turn the election into a
referendum on the communist past, knocking most of his would-be
rivals out of the race and defeating Zyuganov in the second round by
a comfortable 14 percent margin. One should not forget the effects of
the lavish distribution of pork from federal coffers in the run-up to
the election. As the joke goes, "How is a presidential election
organized? In three stages: first the campaign; then the voting; then
the rebuilding of the national economy." The President's media
manipulators were even able to hide from the public the fact that
Yeltsin suffered a heart attack just days before the second round of
the election. But Yeltsin's victory came at a price: the clock of
political change was turned back five years.

If Yeltsin had resigned in 1993, a new democratic leader such as
Grigory Yavlinsky might well have emerged triumphant--or perhaps a
Communist would have regained the presidency. Either way, the new
president would have had to adapt to the fundamental changes that had
already occurred in Russian society--or he would have been voted out
of office at the next election. Real institution-building, as opposed
to political posturing and clan warfare, would have proceeded apace.
Instead, here we are in 1997, facing three more years of Boris
Yeltsin, and with no clear picture of what will follow him. At least
a decade will have passed since the fall of communism before Russian
voters get to experience a "normal" election, in which voters choose
between competing governments, rather than take part in ritualistic
referendums on their past.

Political Style and Culture

Six years after his accession to power, Yeltsin's monocratic approach
to politics has clearly exhausted its usefulness. The features of
Yeltsinocracy are plain: He has devised, willy-nilly, an ingenious
and robust system of rule that enables the current political elite to
stay in power despite the abject failure of their policies on nearly
all fronts.

The country is ruled by decree, of which the President signs about
1,500 a year. Most of the major government programs of the past five
years have been carried out by presidential fiat, such as the 1995
cash privatization, which saw half a dozen leading oil companies
auctioned off at bargain prices to favored banks. Federal budget
spending is essentially carried out by decree. Last year, for the
first time, the budget was passed into law--but the government
ignored it, slashing certain spending categories at will because of a
shortfall in tax receipts. This year, having failed to get the Duma
to approve a revised budget plan in mid-year, the government
announced that it would cut spending by 20 percent even without Duma
authorization. In June Chubais expressed his displeasure with the
Duma's performance, which sounded rather strange, since in most
democracies it is the legislature that passes judgment on the
executive, not the other way around.

The problem with ruling a country by decree as opposed to law is that
there is no publicly accountable procedure governing their
adoption--all that matters is getting Yeltsin's signature at the
bottom. No one knows when a decree may be revoked, or replaced by
another decree. There is no requirement of an open debate on the
merits and defects of a decree, or oversight as to how it is carried
out. As a result many half-baked measures are hastily passed, only to
be withdrawn or abandoned after public outcry. (A striking example is
the tax reform introduced in August 1996 that proposed draconian new
controls on bank deposits and was quickly withdrawn after a hail of
criticism.) One is reminded of a saying from the last century: The
strictness of Russia's laws is exceeded only by the laxity of their
implementation.

Even Yeltsin's administration cannot get around the fact that some
issues have to be encapsulated in law. Foreign investors, after all,
do not want to see their rights subject to the vagaries of decrees.
The Duma, painted into a corner as an "irreconcilable opposition",
retaliates in kind by failing to pass much-needed laws, such as a new
land code, a new tax code, and a law on production sharing in mineral
projects.

Many decrees are ignored, but some are implemented with great vigor.
Only those having close personal contact with the President can know
which are which. As in the court of Louis XIV, physical access to the
ruler is the key--hence the increasing personalization of Russian
politics, with access as the prize. Over the years access to Boris
Nikolaevich has been controlled by such diverse figures as his tennis
partners, his chief bodyguard, and most recently his youngest
daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, who became a member of his campaign team
last spring. In June of this year, just after the Duma recessed for
the summer, Yeltsin formally appointed Dyachenko as his official
adviser. She explained that her role is "to tell the truth to
Papa"--which, of course, begs the question of what his other advisers
have been telling him over the last few years.

Rule by decree produces badly conceived and badly implemented
policies. Yeltsin's way of dealing with that consequence is to fire
people. He is most at home banging his fist on the table and berating
his subordinates. Such a fate befell General Igor Rodionov, appointed
defense minister in August 1996 and ignominiously dismissed ten
months later after a humiliating dressing-down in front of television
cameras. Rodionov later explained that while in office he had found
it impossible to get a personal audience with Yeltsin, and that even
a secretly coded letter he wrote to the President was apparently not
delivered. Yeltsin's penchant for firing ministers means that it has
now become very difficult to persuade competent people to take on the
job. (Admittedly, the fact that a minister earns only about $1,000 a
month is not a great incentive either.) It is surreal to watch
Yeltsin surface every few months and profess surprise and outrage at
the incompetence of a government chosen and appointed by none other
than B.N. Yeltsin.

Another distinctive feature of Yeltsin's political style is the
careful manipulation of promotions and demotions to balance rival
cliques and prevent subordinates from accumulating too much power.
Yeltsin has used old-guard bureaucrats like Victor Chernomyrdin and
Oleg Soskovets to balance pro-reform radicals like Yegor Gaidar and
Anatoly Chubais. In a dramatic June 1996 showdown he ejected the
Soskovets clan, which controlled the metallurgy and defense
industries and backed the Chechen war. Yet at the same time he
bolstered the role of another hawk over Chechnya, the "strong man"
interior minister, General Anatoly Kulikov. Over the past six years
Yeltsin has strengthened the police and interior troops in order to
spread his bets and avoid dependence on the army, whose passivity in
1991 ensured his accession to power. While the army has been starved
of cash, the police have been well funded; there are now 50 percent
more police and interior troops than in Soviet days. Currently,
General Kulikov, a bitter opponent of market reform, is being held in
reserve to be deployed when necessary against ex-General Alexander
Lebed, or similar "patriotic" challengers.

Another common Yeltsin practice is to bring in figures from outside
who have some popular appeal, and then abandon them when the need has
passed. Ruslan Khasbulatov (former Duma chairman), Aleksander Rutskoi
(Yeltsin's vice president), and Lebed (briefly appointed to the
Security Council last year) each in turn played this role. Nemtsov is
the latest occupant of the crown prince's throne, and Yeltsin seems
to have genuine affection for the young ex-governor of Nizhny
Novgorod. But no one should be surprised to pick up the newspaper
tomorrow and find out that Nemtsov has been dismissed because he was
"too headstrong", or because he did not take care to pay the
babushkas' pensions. It is important to remember that with Yeltsin in
the Kremlin, as Andrei Traub has put it, "any government in Russia is
a temporary one."

Beneath the reformist bluster, Yeltsin has resurrected at the
national level a political system that mimics in several respects the
stagnated Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev. An incapacitated leader
is surrounded by all-powerful bureaucrats, regional leaders press for
more independence, and an apathetic public looks on in disgust. The
intelligentsia knows that something is badly wrong, but cannot see a
way out. In some ways, as former Yeltsin aide Pavel Voshchanov has
noted, the current situation is even worse than the Brezhnev era, in
that the countervailing structures of party committees have now gone,
and "administrative tyranny has almost become a way of life." And
unlike Brezhnev, Yeltsin frequently abdicates responsibility for
policy, tolerating violations (by regional leaders, by corrupt
officials) so long as they flatter him with professions of loyalty.

During the late Soviet era, citizens enjoyed a certain degree of
security and predictability in their lives. Now that too has gone,
with living standards shrinking and income differentials growing. As
the popular joke has it, "At least there was something to steal when
Brezhnev was in control." Yeltsin himself drew a parallel with the
past when he referred to the actions of his administration during the
months that he was sick as a "government of stagnation"--stagnation
(zastoi) being a code word for the Brezhnev era.

A Potemkin President

In Soviet times the West took for granted that political power was
concentrated in the Kremlin, and it was logical that Western policy
should then focus on sustaining the reformist aspirations of Mikhail
Gorbachev. That policy turned out to be good for the West, since it
led--serendipitously, perhaps--to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
U.S. policy toward Russia has once again become inextricably entwined
with the political fate of one man--Boris Yeltsin--but it no longer
makes sense to focus on one man, nor are the consequences likely to
be as benign.

Modern Russia is a chaotic and confusing place, full of contradictory
trends and unexpected twists and turns. Like a spaceship landing on
an alien planet, the immediate--and natural--response of Western
politicians on arrival in Moscow is to cry, "Take me to your leader."
And there, sitting in the dazzlingly refurbished Kremlin, is a man
well suited to the part. However, far from leading his country to the
tranquil pastures of "market democracy", Yeltsin has launched Russia
on a permanent revolution. Paradoxically, he has become an immovable
fixture by casting himself as the leader of the transition, the only
man who can save Russia from its communist past. He is the ultimate
interim leader--a Potemkin president propped up in office by rival
cliques who cannot agree on where to take the country, but who use
Yeltsin's authority to wield power while they can, for ends fair or
foul. Yeltsin is now hoist with his own petard: He initially
consolidated his power by playing off one clique against another, but
now he is the virtual prisoner of warring clans, shuttled from one
sanitarium to another as they vie for the spoils of the ongoing
privatization of state assets. At times, as when Yeltsin denounces
his own government, or disco dances for the cameras, it resembles a
comic opera, but the potential for tragedy is never far away.

Yeltsin's peccadilloes (being drunk during a state visit, or conducting an orchestra) may be amusing to Westerners, reassured to see a thigh-slapping, hard-drinking, bear-hugging Russian in the Kremlin. But they are less reassuring to Russians, who recall that this is the man who sent the army into Chechnya and presides over a government unable to pay its pensioners and teachers. And Yeltsin is still the person in charge of the country's nuclear arsenal, a fact of which we were reminded by his spontaneous comment at the signing of the NATO treaty in Paris this May, to the effect that all Russian warheads would be "removed." (Spokesmen struggled to explain that what he really meant was that they would be retargeted - but they had already been retargeted.)

The only thing that will remove Yeltsin from office is his mortality. By May 1997 his public support had fallen back to where it was eighteen months earlier - 8 percent.But as in the Brezhnev era, it is not public opinion that matters but the President's medical reports. International financial markets are even more Yeltsinocentric than Western political leaders: The merest hint of medical trouble causes the markets to panic. Yeltsin was out of action ("working on documents", as his press releases put it) for eight of the twelve months following his re-election, due to quintuple heart by-pass surgery and subsequent bouts with pneumonia. On July 7, 1997, he again left the Kremlin, this time for a two month vacation. When he is out of town Victor Chernomyrdin minds the shop, and the Russian government effectively goes into hibernation until the Boss resurfaces and starts firing off decrees.

Assuming that Yeltsin stays alive, he will have to leave office in the year 2000, since the constitution limits him to two terms. There was talk of finding a way to enable him to serve a third term, but his announcement of September 1 that he would step down when his present term ends has put an end to such talk, at least for now. In any event, Yeltsin is mortal, and sooner or later he must be replaced. Contemplation of that eventuality underscores the fragility of the political order that Yeltsin has built. It is unclear who could step into Yeltsin's shoes; indeed, it is hard to imagine any other individual being able to fill the role he has created for himself. Yeltsin has achieved a feat of political levitation - sustaining himself in power despite the lack of visible support from any organized social groups or even business elites. No other Russian political leader could pull off such a performance, since Yeltsin and Yeltsin alone can claim to have delivered Russia from communism. One potential crown prince after another has been picked up, used, discredited, and discarded.(19) The current chosen son, Boris Nemtsov, will likely suffer a similar fate. And then we will be back exactly to where we were in 1996, staring at the possible victory of a Communist candidate, even though this candidate is supported by only one-quarter of the population, because the divide-and-decree methodology of Yeltsinocracy has prevented the formation of a healthy political party representing the forces of Russia's centrist majority.

Where does this leave Russia? Despite the gloomy morass that Russian politics has become, the prospect of a messy political crisis following Yeltsin's demise should not be cause for excessive alarm. If the center of gravity in Russia's political and economic system has indeed shifted decisively to the regions, then the feuding inside the Moscow beltway should not spill over into a social cataclysm, and Russian democracy may emerge from such a crisis stronger than before. This guarded optimism is based on the absence of significant, organized challenges to market democracy. The military is in no condition to mount a coup, the communist opposition is not able to organize a revolution, and the regional bosses, who mostly rule with a tight hand, do not want to disrupt the status quo. Scary scenarios of violent social conflict, civil war, and military coups are implausible.

It is not an abrupt collapse that threatens Russia, but the steady sapping of its human resources as poverty and despair take their toll, while much of its elite flees oversees. It is not only hard cash that is leaving Russia (at the rate of about $15 billion a year); the country is also losing its human capital. It is striking, for example, that not only Yeltsin's grandson, but also the son of Chubais and the daughter of Yeltsin's top aide Valentin Yumashev are attending the exclusive British public school Mill field (fees $25,000 a year). What signal does this send to the Russian people about the leaders' confidence in their country's future (let alone its education system)? Russia urgently needs visionary - but effective - national leadership to put its economic and political institutions on a sound footing, something that Yeltsin's reformers have tried, but thus far failed, to achieve.

Russians like to point out that they are a patient and tough people, who have seen their society disintegrate more than once during this century (in 1905, 1917, 1932, 1937, and 1941). Each time, Russia recovered. Russians are now waiting, some calmly, some desperately, for such a renaissance to occur once more - and eventually it will. This time around, however, it is highly unlikely that Russia will re-emerge as a military superpower. For once, it may well be a normal country.

Peter Rutland is associate professor of government at Wesleyan University.