An Unholy Alliance May Kill Democracy in Russia : Yelstin: A union of fascists and communists has pushed the Russian president to the right in an effort to defuse his critics. To survive, he turns authoritarian.

During the presidential campaign, American voters seemed united in at least one thing: Foreign affairs were not a central issue. Unfortunately, rapid, destabilizing changes abroad, especially in the successor states of the Soviet empire, do not give us the luxury of adopting “splendid isolation.” As Robert Strauss, U.S. ambassador to Russia, said last week, should democratic governments in Eastern Europe, especially in Russia, fail to sink strong roots, the resulting chaos would soon enough have a drastic domestic impact in the United States.

The economic and political situation in Russia is indeed becoming graver. According to the Russian constitution, President Boris N. Yeltsin has four more years to serve, and, as yet, there is no single individual or group who commands wide enough support among the populace to challenge him directly. Nonetheless, Yeltsin is increasingly beset by intemperate critics and the intractable problems he has inherited.

Critics say the Russian president has shown himself to be vindictive, as in his running feud with Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Also, they claim, he has shown a disturbing tendency to rule by decree. Earlier this year, he seemed willing to discuss returning the Kuril Islands to Japan in exchange for economic assistance; in August, he suddenly canceled his plans to visit Japan and announced the disputed islands would remain Russian. Earlier, he signed agreements with the newly independent Baltic states, scheduling a withdrawal of Russian troops from their soil by August, 1993; last week, he reversed himself, suspending the troop removal indefinitely. And in late October, when a coalition of Russian nationalists formed a “National Salvation Front,” with the expressed purpose of toppling him, Yeltsin ordered the group disbanded, accusing it of planning an unconstitutional seizure of power.

To many Russians, these signs prove that Yeltsin has succumbed to the ancient Russian authoritarian tradition. Some have even dubbed him “Tsar Boris”--a historical analogy with the Russian ruler of the late 16th Century who came to power through questionable means and whose reign was followed by a disastrous period known as the “Time of Troubles.”

Unquestionably, Yeltsin has drifted rightward, but this is, in large part, an indication of where his most significant opposition is centered. This is shown most starkly in the case of the National Salvation Front, a coalition of former communist apparatchiks , Orthodox Russian nationalists and anti-Semitic xenophobes. Its enemies have called it a union of black shirts (fascists) and red shirts (communists). This is no exaggeration.

At first glance, the front seems inherently unstable; indeed, it probably would be should it ever seize power. After all, what could possibly link former atheist communist internationalists with pious Orthodox nationalists, aging Stalinists with former inmates of the Gulag who believe Russia has a spiritual mission? The only link is a shared sense of wounded nationalism. For Russian nationalists, the past five years, which the world at large has welcomed as the freeing of Russia, have been disastrous. As one Russian told me as we watched the fireworks celebrating Yeltsin’s victory over the August, 1991, coup: “A plague has descended on Russia.”

The front is further proof that the one thing linking the extremes of right and left is a shared hostility to liberal democracy and open societies. Soviet apparatchiks mourn the loss of Soviet power, the East European empire and the respect the Soviet Union used to command through its military might and supposed ideological appeal. This element is numerically weak but well-placed in Russian society, since it supplied the administrative class. Their newspapers--Pravda, Sovetskaia Rossiia, and the military paper Krasnaia zvezda--are a mixture of the defiant and the pathetic. They worship past Soviet technological and sporting achievements, while lamenting the advent of a market economy, the proliferation of various political viewpoints and what they see as Yeltsin’s unilateral dismantling of the Soviet military in the face of a still-arrogant U.S. Pentagon.

Allied with this group in the front, but in many ways very different, are the non-communist Russian nationalists. These people see dark forces at work undermining the Russian state and society. They dislike the market economy, the loss of a largely mythical Orthodox Christian spiritual unity among the Russian people; they believe that Yeltsin has abandoned his “brother Slavs,” the Serbs, whom they see as being unjustly vilified by the West. Above all, many of these nationalists decry what they believe to be the malign influence of “international Jewry” in Russia.

Yeltsin first showed himself to be vulnerable to his nationalist critics when he reversed himself over the Kuril Islands dispute. Many Americans professed themselves unable to understand the Russians’ unwillingness to cede these economically and strategically insignificant islands in exchange for Japanese assistance. We would do well to remember the furor raised here over the Japanese purchase of Rockefeller Center. For the Russians, the sense of national humiliation and relative weakness is amplified many times over. Accustomed as they are to seeing themselves as a superpower, the Japanese offer, in effect, to buy the islands seemed a slap in the face. The humiliation was all the greater, coming as it did in the wake of the collapse of the old union and secession of the non-Russian republics. Politically, Yeltsin could do little other than promise to keep the islands Russian.

Yeltsin’s most serious challenge from the nationalist right will come very soon over the fate of ethnic Russians living in the now-independent former Soviet republics. Several prominent members of the National Salvation Front have called openly for restoration of the old Soviet boundaries, by force if necessary, and they have pointed to the Bosnian impasse as proof of the fact that the world would not lift a finger to stop such a reconquest.

Although such talk is wild, the nationalists do have a point; some of the former Soviet republics, notably Estonia and Latvia, have passed laws stripping citizenship from ethnic Russians long resident in those states. This explains why Yeltsin has slowed down the removal of troops from these states.

In other areas, such as Georgia, Russians are endangered by interethnic fighting. In both Georgia and Moldova, Russian military officers have promised to act to defend ethnic Russians, whether they are supported by Yeltsin or not. Last week, Yelstin declared a state of emergency in North Ossetia and the Ingush Republic, saying that Russia’s territorial integrity was at stake in the conflict between the two enclaves.

Yeltsin moved against the front now because the challenge from the right is about to come to a head. The Congress of Peoples Deputies, due to open Dec. 1, was elected in 1989. Accordingly, most of its delegates are former communists and have very little chance of winning truly free elections. If they want to unseat Yeltsin, they must do so soon or risk being rejected themselves by the voters.

Yeltsin sounds increasingly embattled. Beset by domestic critics, he has begun to ask when he can expect greater assistance from the Western states. Late last week, he proposed a get-acquainted summit with Bill Clinton and unveiled an ambitious agenda for new Russian-American cooperation.

Although Yeltsin will likely ride out his current difficulties, he will prevail by resorting to more authoritarian means. Don’t be surprised if he suddenly is less willing to support Western policies.