COLUMN ONE : Russia’s Identity Crisis : Communism is toppled, capitalism not yet established. With no clear ideology to hold on to, Russians are searching for who they are. The field is wide open.

Hunched over his beer mug, aviation engineer Anatoly Kuzovlev waved a greasy hand at the pile of bones from the dried fish he had already washed down and intoned: “This is all we have left to believe in. Beer and salty fish.”

Sergei Gosachinsky, leaning on a nearby counter in the central Moscow beer hall, was feeling less cynical but equally lost. “We haven’t figured out yet what Russia means,” the 47-year-old conductor said. “And what it means to be Russian. What it meant once is already destroyed and nothing is left of it, and to restore it is impossible. So what are we now?”

Many nations do fine without a grand idea of their destiny. But for Russians, said historian Elena Vysochina, “There is an urgency about these issues. Even when they get drunk, they talk about the meaning of life. It’s part of the Russian mentality--a kind of messianic idea that if you’re Russian, you must be something special.”

From bar-stool philosophy sessions to offices in the Kremlin, from newsrooms to movie theaters and think tanks, Russia is searching for a new idea of itself, of what makes it special and what it stands for as a nation.

In a mounting clash of concepts, rival ideologues are pushing their claims to holding the one true key to a new Russian identity--be it Western-style democracy, Eastern-style mysticism, a return to the past or a jump into the 21st Century.

The field is certainly wide open.

The Russian national anthem still lacks lyrics. It is unclear when Russia’s historical birthday should be celebrated. Even its double-barreled official name, as approved by Parliament, bespeaks a country that hasn’t made up its mind: “The Russian Federation--Russia.”

“We’re sunk in a deep ideological vacuum,” said Igor Shamshchev, a philosophy professor now working for Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin. “The collapse of the Soviet empire came at the same time as the collapse of Communist ideology and the point of living for all the people who believed in it.

“The whole mentality that was built over all these years was destroyed, and in its place there is practically nothing,” he said.

Yeltsin’s administration, though heavy on symbolic flag-waving, long ignored the demand for a new national idea, spurning anything that smacked of ideology as too reminiscent of decades of force-fed communism.

Only one adviser, Sergei Stankevich, spoke out this spring in a full-page article calling for “the prompt formulation of an idea of Russia” that could provide “a way of life combining tradition, common sense, freedom and harmony.”

“Having freed ourselves, we first and foremost released our own barbarism, our own emptiness and nastiness,” he said. “There is no great idea, no more fear of the system’s iron grip, no God in our souls, and that means everything is permitted.”

“And smuta sets in,” he said, using the Russian word for the chaotic 17th-Century period of revolts, foreign intervention, false pretenders to the throne and general anarchy that ended only with the accession of the Romanov dynasty.

In recent weeks, Yeltsin’s government has begun to change its tack. Yeltsin himself commented recently that “this is an amazing country. No one else in the world can understand this. . . . As long as our citizens believe in something, they’ll persevere.”

But it is a little late. The battle of ideas, waged with fiery rhetoric in the popular press, scholarly journals and ever more loudly in politics, is already well under way.

On the defensive, the Yeltsin camp is scrambling to fend off powerful arguments from a New Right of vehement nationalists even while bucking the appeal that old-style communism still holds for many Russians.

Some describe the intellectual conflict as rivalry between nationalists and “cosmopolitans,” who siphon ideas from abroad. Others, recalling 19th-Century Russia’s philosophical fights, see the division as between Slavophiles--Russian purists seen as deeply religious and conservative--and rational pro-Westerners.

Many arguments focus on abstract questions that “can never really be answered,” said Alexei Salmin, who oversees political prediction-making at the Gorbachev Fund, Russia’s biggest think tank. “But the vector of the country will be decided in the current struggle.”

Salmin’s pollsters describe a nation almost equally divided on what should be its guiding principles, with about one-quarter backing the old Communist-style control, one-quarter supporting full-fledged capitalism and the remaining half somewhere in between. About 10% of Russians espouse ultranationalism, he said, which is about average for Europe.

Shamshchev and his colleagues in the Kremlin are intent on winning over their compatriots to their concept of Russia as a liberal, democratic, free society that encourages each member to live up to his potential.

The old Communist creed hinged on the idea of creating a utopia in which there would be no private property and no poor, in which all people would be totally equal and work hard for the sake of the collective.

But the new creed, Shamshchev said, might go like this: “The old regime said, ‘Don’t stand out.’ We say, ‘Show the capabilities given you by God and nature. Show initiative.’

“ ‘Be your own master,’ ” he continued. “ ‘Work hard, don’t lie, work for real, don’t steal because now you’ll be stealing from yourself or from another owner--there is no more owner-less property. Be good to your dear ones and take care of the old and sick and poor. Study hard, because now you’re going to live by your own brains.’ ”

In broader terms, Yeltsin’s government propounds keeping nations whole only by consent, rather than by force, and protecting the 20 million Russians living in former Soviet republics by using international human rights law, not weapons.

The trick, Shamshchev said, will be to take Russians’ traditions--including their tendency to see themselves as part of one big, strictly run family instead of a free, dynamic market--and combine them with universal values in a new hybrid society.

All of this may sound praiseworthy, but it is a bitter draft for the regulars at the little bar on Moscow’s Ring Road.

“It’s all deception,” said Kuzovlev’s florid-faced drinking buddy, welder Valery Nikulkin. “The government sings its preaching at us, but it doesn’t fulfill its promises.”

“They say, ‘Take initiative,’ but there’s no basis for it,” adds Kuzovlev, a tall man in well-worn polyester. “They say we’ll get rich, but we’re no wheeler-dealers. Whoever was poor will remain poor.”

These are typical reactions of the Russian masses, said Alexander Dugin, a young ideologue who writes for the nationalist newspaper Den, or Day. He argues that ideas like Yeltsin’s--touting the power of the individual, rational thought and economic freedom--will never take.

“We can accept anything but that,” he said. “Anything--rightist totalitarianism, leftist totalitarianism, collectivism, fascism, communism, Stalinism, nationalist democracy, collective democracy--any-thing, only not that. It will never be.”

Dugin describes Yeltsin as an “ideological paratrooper” who has parachuted into a foreign land determined to colonize all the natives into changing their beliefs. “Yeltsin, along with his group of paratroopers, is fighting against the history of the Russian people, the Russian church, Russian religion and also all the Continent’s forms of social and religious life,” he said.

The alternative that Dugin and many new Russian nationalists propose is a heady concoction, heavy on the idea that Russians are deeply different from their Western neighbors and that the continent of Eurasia is meant to balance and compete with America in the world scheme of things.

“Russians believe they have a mission,” Dugin said, harking back to 19th-Century beliefs that Russia would become the “Third Rome,” the next center of world Christianity after Rome and Byzantium. “You can’t convince them otherwise.”

For Dugin and other nationalists, Russia offers the world a more spiritual way of being, perhaps one just as opposed to America’s ideology as Soviet communism was.

He said that Russians prefer the collective to the individual; they feel closer to the “irrational unconscious” than to rational thought; they care more about political principles than economic success.

“They reject the idea that the rich can be rich at the expense of the poor,” he said. “We’ll take Bolshevism, the Gulag, terror, but not rich people at the expense of poor people. We don’t want to be rich; we want truth.”

Sergei Kurginyan, a right-wing political scientist and columnist, sees Russia as still vying with America for control over who will oversee the world as it comes together in the global unity forecast for the 21st Century.

“Russia cannot be anything but a great power. The only question here is what kind of greatness we’re talking about. There is the greatness of an elephant, the greatness of a tiger and that of a cobra,” he said. “And changing the type of greatness may be a truly horrifying thing.”

The nationalists tend toward such dire predictions, going as far as Dugin’s warning that Russia will either settle into its true ideology or “turn into a nuclear desert.” Nationalist politicians routinely voice fears that Yeltsin is leading the country into chaos and civil war; they call for military intervention to defend Russians threatened abroad.

In their distaste for the brutality of capitalism and the disarray of Yeltsin’s reforms, Russia’s nationalists and remaining hard-line Communists find natural allies in each other, often coming together in what opponents deride as the “Red-Brown coalition.”

Their visions for Russia’s future remain different, however, with the Communists still insisting on their old dream of a classless society while the nationalists preach more of a return to Russia’s pre-Bolshevik days.

The nationalists use the past as a potent weapon, leaning on rewritten histories that make Czarist Russia resemble a lost Eden.

Stanislav Govorukhin, a Russian movie director renowned for his classic cinematic indictment of the Communist regime, “This Is No Way to Live,” has come out with a sweeping new mix of propaganda and documentary called “The Russia That We Lost.”

“Without roots, ancestors, history and genetic memories, we will never find the right road,” the ever-gloomy director says in the film’s somber introduction. “The more we learn about this country, the more we fall in love with it.”

Govorukhin goes on to paint an idyllic version of life before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, backed by cheery old photographs of smiling workers and price lists of unimaginably cheap foodstuffs. Illiteracy was already almost stamped out, he said, and farmers were so productive that they virtually fed and clothed all of Europe.

Now, under Yeltsin’s painful economic reforms, “war has once again been declared on the Russian people,” he said. “What kind of future can we have under these conditions?”

A great one, insisted Kuzovlev of the Ring Road bar, for all his earlier complaints. “I believe the Russian people will return to greatness. It can’t be any other way.”

Nikulkin noted: “We were ahead and we will be ahead.”

Gosachinsky, the blue-jeaned conductor at the nearby counter, was finishing up his beer but kept thinking aloud. “It’s a long road to understanding what Russia is,” he said, but in the end, the answers will come less from the squabbling of philosophers than from the sea change inside each Russian.

“The main problem for Russians now is to become conscious of ourselves not as a people but as an individual, each one of us,” he said. “That’s the greatest difficulty.”