White House Still Bemused by the Riddle of Yeltsin : Policy: Mistrustful senior aides wonder if he’s a true democrat, worry about what he may do in a crunch.

Despite several positive encounters, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin is still seen by the White House as an enigma, whose commitment to democracy is less than convincing and who has not yet earned the full trust of senior policy-makers.

This sobering impression of Yeltsin is a decided shift from that created by Administration officials in recent months as Washington and Moscow have drawn closer and closer. It emerged in a four-hour interview with a senior Administration official, after a week in which President Bush attended international meetings with the Russian president in Helsinki and Munich.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, presented a bleak picture of the Russian political scene--one in which Yeltsin is at the center, trying almost single-handedly to tug his halting nation from the mire of 70 years of communism without causing competing forces to rebel.

The official’s views reflect an ongoing assessment of the ex-Soviet Union’s travails. That assessment looks at Yeltsin’s central role and the willingness of the Russian people to suffer under the weight of the struggling shift to a free-market economy that has priced so many consumer goods and even food, in some cases, out of reach.

The Administration’s portrait of the ebullient, impulsive, demonstrative Yeltsin has evolved over the last two years--from his first visit to Washington, before he had become the powerful figure of post-Soviet Russia. He was seen two years ago as an inexperienced former Communist official untrained in the ways of Western diplomacy. He has emerged as an almost charismatic leader who played a courageous and crucial role in the ending of Communist rule, beginning with his firm stand against the abortive coup d’etat by hard-line Communists last August.

But, reflecting the undercurrent of uncertainty among senior officials in Washington, one key presidential adviser, when asked whether Yeltsin was indeed a democrat, replied:

“I certainly don’t know. He certainly is a democrat now. Is it out of personal conviction? I don’t know. I’d say the man is a very skillful populist.”

The test of Yeltsin’s convictions, he said, “will come when and if the reforms aren’t working and he has to put himself on the line and push something which is genuinely unpopular. I don’t think we have enough background on him to know what he would do.”

The official continued: “I don’t trust him. I don’t think that’s a word you can use, probably, with any of them because they come out of such a different culture.”

His reference was to 70 years of communism, in which, he said, “there is no such thing as objective truth; whatever advances the cause is right, and therefore true.”

At the same time, the official tempered his assessment by saying that Yeltsin--regardless of his commitment to democracy--”is a genuine reformer . . . because that is the wave to catch.”

“Is he the one we should put our money on? Clearly so,” the official said, answering his own question. “He’s the only one we’ve got. I think he realizes he’s got a tiger by the tail, and maybe he’s bit off more than he can chew. But we genuinely have to support him.”

The Administration faces this puzzling question: Should Yeltsin fall, who would take his place in a country that has no history of democracy? Would it be a leader with a more convincing commitment to democracy? Or would the next Russian president be a more authoritarian figure, in the mold of Communist leaders and, before them, Russian czars? And should Yeltsin stumble, but not fall, will he turn to a more authoritarian role to regain his footing?

Bush has developed an apparently easygoing relationship with the Russian president, with whom he has spent several days over the last half-year--at the United Nations, at Camp David, in Washington and, last week, in Europe.

“The President likes Yeltsin,” said the senior official, who met with a group of reporters over dinner Sunday evening while Bush was on vacation at the family seaside compound a mile away.

But, that personal view aside, he said, “when you’re talking about trust between countries, it is a very precious commodity.”

For his part, Yeltsin has demonstrated increasing sensitivity to the way he and his struggling nation are treated by the fellow government leaders to whom he must turn for financial help.

At the Munich gathering last week, the Russian picked up crucial endorsements from the major industrial nations for his difficult reform efforts.

After a state dinner there, Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato said of Yeltsin: “He looked at me and said to me, ‘I don’t think it’s necessary to put me through another test of maturity.’ It’s a quip that I liked a lot. He comes with this very cordial manner. But he’s convinced that every time our countries look at him, they are putting him through another examination.”

In the view of the senior Administration official, the pressures on Yeltsin could come from such diverse segments of society as the Red Army--or the Russian people themselves.

Asked how much time Yeltsin has to begin relieving economic pressures on his nation before he is judged a failure and a political upheaval forces him to shift policy or depart, the official said of the Russians:

“They are very stoic. After some period . . . of chaos, confusion, uncertainty, (they find appealing) someone who says: ‘Enough of this. Trust me. What we need is a strong, positive leader.’ I don’t know when that will be. There’s a fair chance that (it) will come.

“That’s when you find out what Yeltsin really is,” he said.

At this point, he added, “the army is pretty deeply suspicious. What they see is . . . a correlation of forces having shifted dramatically; that the Soviet Union has disappeared, that Russia’s foreign policy is closely aligned with the United States in many areas, that the deep cuts in nuclear forces threaten the heart of what makes the Soviet Union, Russia, a superpower. So, they are not overjoyed.”

At the heart of the White House concern are two disturbing examples from history: the 1917 Russian Revolution, which brought the Communists to power, and the failure of the post-World War I Weimar Republic that led to the ascendancy of the Nazis in Germany. In both cases, the official said, the West’s failure to recognize that the world was at a turning point led to greater problems.