NEWS ANALYSIS : Yeltsin, No Longer a Hero, Under Fire From All Sides

The cheering has stopped for Boris N. Yeltsin, the man who saved Russian democracy from a conservative putsch last summer and then brought an end to more than seven decades of Soviet socialism.

Popular “trust” in the Russian president has declined to 32%, according to recent surveys of residents of Moscow and the country’s other major cities, and fear that the future will be worse than anything experienced until now stands at 69%.

Yeltsin is the target of criticism from the radical left, which believes him both authoritarian and prone to easy compromises on economic and political reforms, and from conservative Communists, who want him impeached.

He is locked in a perpetual struggle with lawmakers in the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, not only over such controversial programs as land reform and the selloff of state enterprises but also over fundamental questions of constitutional power, including who rules.

And, with his own supporters squabbling so much among themselves that their loyalty is sometimes in doubt, the president has been forced to bring into his government members of the old Communist Party nomenklatura that he had overthrown.

After one year as Russia’s first president, six months after the collapse of the Soviet Union and on the eve of a major summit in Washington with President Bush, Yeltsin appears to have lost much of his early dynamism. Defensive where he used to challenge, cautious where he had been bold, Yeltsin seems increasingly burdened by the magnitude of the problems confronting his country and personally worn down by the struggle for change.

“The first year has not been an easy one,” Yeltsin commented last week. “It was so eventful that at another time it might have been enough for the whole presidency.”

There have, indeed, been major achievements: the defeat of the attempted coup by hard-line Communists, an end to Soviet socialism, the recent emergence of a democratic Russia in Europe, the freeing of other nations in the old Soviet Union to seek their own destinies and the start of the transformation to a free-market economy.

But Yeltsin was also mindful of the costs: the even faster disintegration of the Soviet economy, once the world’s second-largest; the soaring inflation and declining living standards that have come with it; sharpened threats to Russian security from nations that were once sister Soviet republics, and a rapid crumbling of social order.

And what he has to offer Russia’s 150 million people, Yeltsin says with a courageous frankness, is more suffering: Things will get worse, he told them again last week, before they get better.

“I know that, adopting the course of reform, we will inflict suffering, if temporary, on the people,” Yeltsin said in a television interview on the anniversary of his election. “I knew that the people would have to take a bitter pill in order to get cured--we have swallowed that pill.

“Certainly, there are a lot of difficulties, but faith has remained. When I meet with people, I see most have retained their faith, and this is what matters. The thing that would lead to collapse, I think, is the disappearance of faith. Therefore, I address the (people) of Russia and say to them: Believe in reform, believe in the president!”

But Yeltsin is frustrated by the same problems that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev found so intractable: a collapsing economy, government structures that are neither democratic nor effective, a political system unable to resolve the country’s problems.

Radical reformers, Yeltsin foremost among them, concluded during the Gorbachev years that a carefully managed, stage-by-stage transformation of the Soviet system would never succeed because the sheer volume of compromises would choke it. Thus, Yeltsin installed a youthful team of pro-market economists as his government and gave them free rein.

The “economy we took as the key link,” one of his economic strategists said. “That’s where there had been almost zero progress; we knew economic change would be the motor for further political change and that’s the measure people would use for our program. Unfortunately, the situation was more desperate than we understood, not everything was correctly calculated, some plans were modified and more time will be needed.”

Now, says Lidya Shevtsova, deputy director of the Institute of International Economic and Political Research, a leading think tank, “The revolutionary path is being replaced by compromises. The period of the shock thrust into the market is finishing, and a new stage is beginning where we think about ‘stabilization’ and ‘avoiding confrontation.’ ”

While these concerns relate to the intense struggle over economic reform, Yeltsin finds his presidency jeopardized, because economic policies are the most immediate political issues as well.

“The main thing is that an economic reform program has actually been launched,” Yeltsin said in appraising his first year--and comparing it to what he sees as the largely ineffectual period of perestroika under Gorbachev. “These are not empty promises. . . .”

But that start on basic reforms is judged far more harshly by others.

“The catastrophe has become total,” Gennady Osipov, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Socio-Political Research, said in an interview with the Communist newspaper Pravda. “Russia is being pushed to the edge of an abyss from which it will never be able to extract itself.”

Yeltsin lacks a clear program, Osipov argued, and his government’s priorities have been wrong, tearing apart the old political and economic structures without anything to replace them. Also, Yeltsin is deluding himself, according to Osipov, if he believes the reforms he has decreed in Moscow are actually being implemented across so large and diverse a country.

“As few as 6% of those polled believe their lives will get better by year’s end,” Osipov said, quoting opinion surveys by his institute. “The overall negative attitude toward the present structures of state power and government leads to pessimism and political indifference.”

Although such assessments might be dismissed as simply conservative or even pro-Communist, they are an expression of the widespread, though minority, view that evolutionary changes are preferable to the radical transformation that Yeltsin is convinced is necessary.

“The new leaders are very good at destroying things, but they have not yet proved their ability to get things done,” Gorbachev commented last month in a controversial interview in which he urged Yeltsin to listen to his critics. “I think the general course (of the government) is right, but there is a mess in implementing it.”

Even the criticism of the president in pro-Yeltsin newspapers has grown severe in recent months, reflecting impatience with the slowed pace of change and irritation with the less-than-open style of his leadership.

“The new government of Yeltsin is like Mikhail Gorbachev’s favorite--a consensus of everyone with everyone else,” economic commentator Mikhail Leontiev wrote in the influential, left-of-center newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta last week, complaining that Yeltsin has lost his surge-ahead approach to reform. “Today, there is no alternative to Yeltsin in the democratic camp. However, if we want to see the economic reforms through and build a democratic state, such alternatives must appear as soon as possible.”

But the Russian economy continues to contract at faster rates--13% last year, 11% this year--than those of the Great Depression in the United States. Industrial production is down 13% so far this year, oil and coal production even more and agriculture is in such turmoil that predictions are impossible.

Prices have increased 750% since January as the government has eliminated subsidies to state enterprises and allowed market forces of supply and demand to set prices; pay, however, rose only half that amount, and Russians see their standard of living, never luxurious, worsen day by day.

A third of the population now lives below the government’s poverty line, official statistics show, and one of five families is expected to have at least one member out of work by the end of the year.

Although Yeltsin undertook price reform, a crucial step in economic reform that Gorbachev never dared to take, follow-up moves were delayed, penalizing consumers but leaving enterprises still subsidized. The government must now find money for more than 2 trillion rubles, or roughly $20 billion, of unpaid invoices, if industry is to avoid mass bankruptcies.

“If we had started three to five years ago, rather than in 1992, we would not face most of the problems we now face in Russia,” Yeltsin said, complaining that the reforms had been delayed as Gorbachev sought to promote change while preserving the Communist Party’s privileged position.

But under Yeltsin, the next stages--land reform, ending state monopolies, raising energy prices to world levels, selling off profitable firms and putting money-losers out of business--are also being pushed further and further into the future, although this could jeopardize the $24 billion the West has promised in assistance.

And Yeltsin said the country cannot do much more.

“To live in Russia today is extremely difficult, especially for people employed in the public sector or for those who receive pensions, welfare grants and scholarships,” he said after a trip to outlying regions where many state workers have not been paid since March. “A certain proportion of people live in real poverty.

“Consequently, we are easing on the reforms somewhat, even at the expense of the pace,” he said. “We cannot agree, for example, to a number of demands of the International Monetary Fund, first and foremost, because we do not want to jeopardize the economic reforms through a political backlash.”

This leaves Russia stuck, according to Yeltsin’s own economic strategists, in the difficult transition from state ownership and central planning to market forces and entrepreneurship without agreement, within the government or in society as a whole, on what to do next.

“We are confronted by one major task now--to check the production slump by year end,” Yeltsin said. “That will constitute the low point of the fall. The main condition for reaching that goal is to preserve social stability. Then, with a slow but rising upsurge in production, it will be easier to breathe.”

Faced with that need to revive the economy, Yeltsin is bringing back some managers of the old Soviet planned economy, particularly its military-industrial complex, for their hands-on experience. Despite Yeltsin’s denials, there are growing expectations he will appoint one as prime minister, a post he holds in addition to the presidency.

“Yeltsin sees a different role for himself than the head of an embattled government,” a former aide commented. “He wants to unite the nation, and this sort of day-to-day decision-making is divisive. He wants to set the strategy, not worry about cash flows or coal production. He is really a very good idea man, and the details sap him of energy.”

Yeltsin himself assured Russians: “The determination to carry on with the reforms . . . is there, and we shall not budge. This may be Russia’s last historical chance.”

But he is searching, as is Russia, for a political system that will accomplish this, chastising present legislative structures as unrepresentative, undemocratic and unreformed, creatures of a constitution laid down by the Soviet Communist Party and roadblocks to change.

Thwarted by the Congress of People’s Deputies, the national Parliament, in his efforts to change the system from above, Yeltsin is now encouraging a petition drive for a referendum that would dissolve the old legislative structure and set in motion a constitution-writing process.

“The most important task now is to adopt the constitution of a free and democratic Russia,” he said, adding that he would go to the people for greater authority if lawmakers continued to block key reforms.

To remind those now grumbling over his policies, Yeltsin intends to put the Communist Party “on trial” next month in hearings before the Constitutional Court on whether the party engaged in illegal political activities and thus deserved to be outlawed.

Increasingly sensitive to all criticism, notably from Gorbachev, Yeltsin has selectively opened party archives to highlight its misdeeds through the Gorbachev years and bluntly warned the former Soviet president that he could be silenced.

Yeltsin’s men, to be sure, have a point when they argue, in the words of State Secretary Gennady E. Burbulis, that “the overwhelming majority of Russians are unwilling to return to the old times.

“Unfortunately,” Burbulis added, “we haven’t yet managed to comprehend how little our present specific everyday difficulties mean compared to our common victory over our former humiliating Communist conditions.”

But even Burbulis, Yeltsin’s closest adviser, acknowledges: “We are having to pause a bit . . . so we can move forward.”