Boris Yeltsin, Boris-Yeltsin.com

Yeltsin

Yeltsin, act II.

Yeltsin will probably be re-elected president, but has few specific plans for his second term. He will have to tackle improving the Russian economy, foreign relations, internal ethnic relations, political reform and controlling organized crime. The man who may succeed him is Aleksandr Lebed.

BORIS YELTSIN KNOWS his own strengths and weaknesses. “In emergency situations, I’m strong,” he wrote in “The Struggle for Russia,” his volume of memoirs. “In ordinary situations, I’m sometimes too passive.” He’s right. During his first term as president, Yeltsin powered his way through several emergencies: he faced down a coup by communist hard-liners, and ordered an army assault on rebellious parliamentary opponents. This year he’s staged an extraordinary physical and political comeback. Unless the polls are wrong, he will beat Communist Party challenger Gennady Zyuganov in this week’s runoff election. But in between adrenaline rushes, Yeltsin tends to full into a funk. His chronically weak heart acts up. Or he hits the bottle. Or he just gets bored with the details of governing. And the country drifts along until the next crisis. Is that what the next four years will be like?

Still focused on the campaign, Yeltsin strategists have done little thinking about a second term. Last week they were putting the best face on their candidate’s failure to show up at some campaign events, which revived doubts about his health. Just a sore throat, they said: nothing to worry about. But they did admit to worries that a low turnout could allow Zyuganov to score an upset. Zyuganov’s mostly older voters are expected to come out in force, while younger Yeltsin supporters are far less predictable. Yeltsin’s team hoped to mobilize them by invoking the worst memories of the Soviet era; campaign ads claimed that a vote for Zyuganov would bring back all the horrors of communism. “The politics of frightening people is really working,” says Moscow pollster Maria Volkenstein. The predictable result was a campaign about the past instead of the future.

But the future starts this week. In his second term, Yeltsin will have to try to settle the war in Chechnya, solidify economic and political reform, break the mafia, normalize relations with the former members of the U.S.S.R. and get along with the United States and China. Even Yeltsin supporters wonder if he is up to so challenging an agenda. He’s already on borrowed time; he’s lived seven years longer than the average Russian male, and he’s had two heart attacks. Of course, Yeltsin gets the best health care. Still, a hint that he is weakening will set off a succession struggle. A focus of the next term will be “Who replaces Boris?”

The early speculation centers on Aleksandr Lebed. The retired general’s strong third-place finish in the first. round of the elections catapulted him into the job of Yeltsin’s national-security chief. immediately, the tough-talking Lebed started to overshadow his new boss. Lebed made clear that he saw his mandate as far broader than implementing his campaign promises to crack down on crime and corruption. His Security Council issued a document that called for modifications to the country’s “unjustifiably accelerated” privatization program, a larger state role in the economy, less reliance on foreign loans, strict restrictions on foreign visitors and a new classification of countries “in order of their friendship with Russia.” Speaking to nationalist supporters, Lebed denounced Western “sexual trash or violence” on television and blasted foreign religious sects as “mold and scum”–specifically naming Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo and the Mormons. (Washington quickly asked for “clarification” of that.

The question now is straightforward: would Lebed effectively run the show after a Yeltsin victory? “Now we have a situation of two presidents,” says Aleksandr Konovalov, a military-political analyst. “This can’t last long.” One theory holds that Yeltsin is giving Lebed free rein to win his supporters’ votes; after the runoff, he’ll show Lebed who’s boss. Yeltsin has quickly jettisoned political allies before, but Lebed angrily dismissed such a possibility last week. “Now is not a time when they can use and then discard,” he growled. The president could take a subtler tack, giving Lebed responsibility for negotiating an end to the still messy war in Chechnya, for example. And Lebed is not the only possible successor; Yeltsin has already said there are three men who might follow him, though he coyly refuses to name them. Lebed’s clearly on the list, but so probably is Yuri Luzbkov, Moscow’s popular mayor who won re-election in June with an almost Soviet-style 90 percent of the vote.

Succession aside, the most pressing issue confronting a new Yeltsin administration will be how to pay the bills. Yeltsin made an estimated $11 billion in campaign promises. He pledged everything from coal miners’ back wages to an expansion of the subway system in Novosibirsk. This at a time when the government is falling far behind on tax collection–70 percent of 1995′s tax revenue is overdue, and a new cash crunch is expected in the fall. “The budget is going badly,” Finance Minister Vladimir Panskov conceded recently.

Yet, in general, the economy has picked up–or, at least, bottomed out. Inflation is down to record low levels of about 1 percent a month. Modest growth is projected for next year. Yeltsin’s re-election would also be a signal for which foreign investors have been waiting. “A lot of projects have been pending for more than a year,” says Andrei Volgin, head of a Moscow-based investment firm. “Hundreds of companies are waiting to invest.” But Yeltsin will still have to battle with the communist-dominated Parliament over such issues as land ownership and foreign access to Russia’s oil.

Yeltsin’s foreign policy won’t change. It will almost certainly reflect the more nationalist tone he adopted during the latter part of his first term. His appointment last january of Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov to replace the allegedly pro-Western Andrei Kozyrev quieted his critics. Even Zyuganov praised the switch. “Our foreign policy is almost not questioned now–it’s amazing,” says Yeltsin adviser Sergei Karaganov. At the same time, the Yeltsin team concedes that it will have to come to terms with the NATO enlargement it has so strenuously opposed. And it is proceeding cautiously with a drive to forge new links with former Soviet republics. “Russia cannot back off on reintegration,” says Alexei Pushkov, a coauthor of a policy paper for Yeltsin on the subject. “The problem is how to do this in a way that doesn’t alarm the West.”

Don’t bet against such alarms. All rational assessments of second-term policies are dependent on Yeltsin’s fragile health add hold on power. Despite the real reforms under his leadership, Russian politics remains an odd mixture of democratic practice and Kremlin intrigue around an all-powerful boss. “On the one hand, Yeltsin tries to go down the democratic path,” says sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya. “On the other, he constantly seeks to concentrate all powers in the presidency.” Even a healthy, energetic Yeltsin would be hard-pressed to keep the succession struggle at bay for most of his second term. A Yeltsin who shows the slightest signs of faltering again–physically or politically–will have no chance at all.