Profile : Russia’s Top Judge Stars in Historic Role : ‘We can make our own sunrises and sunsets,’ says Zorkin, who is coaxing his nation toward democracy.

When Valery Dmitrievich Zorkin glances up from the desk in his spacious, wood-paneled office, he sees a bucolic Russian landscape on the opposite wall. Its only remarkable feature is a pale sun that hovers just above the horizon.

The chairman of Russia’s Constitutional Court says he chose the painting for the riddle it suggests--one he often ponders himself and poses teasingly to visitors.

“Can you tell me whether what you see here is a sunset or a sunrise?” he asks them.

Then, after a puzzled silence: “The reason I ask, I compare this to Russia, where the future is entirely in our hands. There is a God. But man can go either way, to God or the devil. We are at a crossroads. We can make our own sunrises or sunsets.”

Zorkin doesn’t really need this prop. His charismatic manner and rhetoric, livened by steel-blue eyes, are enough to convey the drama of post-Communist Russia’s pitfalls and possibilities--and of his own mission to coax this unruly nation, by judicial activism and compromise, into a stable, law-abiding democracy.

It is a mission--assumed in his late 40s after a colorless legal-academic career within the Communist system--that has propelled Zorkin to sudden prominence as chief arbiter in the Titanic struggles for supremacy between reformist President Boris N. Yeltsin and his recalcitrant foes in the Parliament.

Since its creation in October, 1991, two months before the Soviet Union collapsed, the newly independent Russian judiciary under Zorkin has achieved what no court had ever done under czarist or Communist rule. It has declared government acts illegal and managed to reverse them.

Historical parallels are inviting. American scholars like to compare Zorkin to U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall, the legal giant of post-revolutionary America who established the Supreme Court’s ultimate authority on the constitutionality of laws.

Yet Zorkin has staked out a broader, more controversial role that often exceeds his mandate. He goes on television. He speaks out on matters not before his court. He berates the police for protecting organized crime. He summons politicians for round-table debates. He calls for a strong, moderate conservative party to isolate Yeltsin’s fascist opponents. He complains that Yeltsin’s free-market economics have “turned us into beggars.” He does all this, he says, to calm national passions and save the cause of democratic reform.

In his boldest initiative yet, Zorkin stood before the Congress of People’s Deputies last December and threatened Yeltsin and Parliament Speaker Ruslan I. Khasbulatov with impeachment, saying their rivalry had taken Russia to the brink of turmoil.

Those were heady days in Moscow. Frustrated by the Congress, Yeltsin called for a popular referendum aimed at cutting short its term. Khasbulatov threatened to outlaw such a vote. Amid rumors of troop movements, defense and security chiefs were called to Parliament to be grilled on their loyalties.

With the court’s backing, Zorkin then brokered and announced the compromise that made him the hero of that crisis. Before cheering lawmakers, Yeltsin and Khasbulatov shook hands and agreed to an April 11 referendum on a new constitution that may move this nation beyond its obsolete Soviet-era institutions.

“I think that politics and law cannot be separated by a wall,” Zorkin said in an interview, seated at the long conference table where his 13-member court deliberates. “Given a different political climate, as in Germany, for example, the court could sit quietly in some other city and wait until this or that law aroused controversy. But here . . . sometimes emergencies arise and we cannot keep silent.”

Zorkin’s leap from bookworm to activist came after two decades of academic obscurity. Unlike Yeltsin, who openly defied the Soviet leadership in its final years, Zorkin played by the rules, quietly honing his expertise in constitutional law through a broad reading of history that developed his liberal democratic principles.

The son of a Soviet army general and a Russian literature instructor, Zorkin was born 50 years ago next week near a military base in Russia’s Far East. After youthful travel as an army brat, he studied law at Moscow State University and acquired the Communist Party membership he would later need to teach it.

But people with other convictions shaped his thinking. He acquired Orthodox Christian beliefs from his grandmother and democratic ideals from Stepan F. Kichikyan, his thesis adviser, who had been a law professor since before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

“Kichikyan led me to understand the great world of culture--not only Marx, Engels and Lenin, but Aristotle, Plato and Confucius,” Zorkin said. He also introduced Zorkin to the ideas of pre-revolutionary Russian philosophers who had sought a liberal constitutional monarchy under the czars. They became the subject of Zorkin’s doctoral dissertation and an object of his admiration.

Classmates remember Zorkin as a brilliant, modest, affable, hard-working student, more professionally minded than ideological. He failed the first defense of his thesis because, at 34, he was judged by Soviet standards to be at least a decade too young, but he moved over to the Academy of Sciences Institute of State and Law and acquired his doctorate two years later.

He told an interviewer last year that he remained a party member until Oct. 31, 1991. “We weren’t all Sakharovs,” he said. “Anyway, I have no past work for which I should feel ashamed. We all moved through this system, each doing it his own way.”

Zorkin was a professor at the Soviet Interior Ministry academy when Russia, still under Soviet rule, held its first multi-party parliamentary elections in mid-1990. Running as a reformer against five other candidates, he finished first in his district but dropped out to help Mikhail A. Borcharov, a reform-minded capitalist with a better chance in the runoff.

With Zorkin’s help, Borcharov beat the party machine and invited the law professor to advise a committee drafting the republic’s new constitution under the direction of its newly elected leader--Boris Yeltsin. A year later Zorkin rushed to Yeltsin’s side to pen legal protests against the August, 1991, coup that tried unsuccessfully to restore hard-line Soviet rule.

As Soviet power crumbled, Yeltsin and Parliament set up the Constitutional Court as an independent branch. Zorkin led all candidates in the vote by lawmakers. He and his 12 fellow judges got lifetime appointments, new apartments, chauffeured cars, a $1.2-million annual budget and salaries equal to Yeltsin’s--now the equivalent of $122 per month--theoretically to insulate them from corrupting influence.

To boost the court’s prestige even higher, Zorkin has waged a public awareness campaign. On one television show, he climbed into a boxing ring to act out his role as a referee separating two fighters--the executive and legislative powers.

“For someone who spent his life in academia, he’s a fox,” said Astrid Tuminez, who worked with the court last year as assistant director of Harvard University’s Project on Strengthening Democratic Institutions. “He understands how power works, how to build institutions. Zorkin built the court from nothing. I don’t think even Yeltsin wanted it to be so prominent.”

The court’s first ruling struck down Yeltsin’s decree to merge the Interior Ministry and the former KGB into a super security agency under presidential control. The court argued that the president was legally obliged to consult the Supreme Soviet legislature.

Two rulings went against government efforts to slash public spending at workers’ expense. One outlawed forced retirement at age 60. The other ordered the government to fulfill a contract to sell railroad workers automobiles at state-subsidized prices.

Its most controversial ruling, after a cathartic six-month trial, last year upheld Yeltsin’s right to divest the Communist Party of state assets but not to bar it from political activity.

Zorkin’s court has also shown a willingness to take on the legislature, overruling it twice for usurping presidential authority. And it has stood firmly against the secession of republics from the Russian Federation, outlawing an independence referendum in Tatarstan.

Fellow judges say tactful negotiating skills, learned in part from the pile of conflict management manuals on his desk, have helped Zorkin orchestrate the court’s decisions and persuade losing parties to obey.

“He is the most brilliant constitutional specialist among us,” said Ernest Ametistov, a member of the court. “We are all very different judges, sometimes absolute opposites. He has a strong gift for compromise.”

Russian and foreign legal specialists are impressed by the quality and evenhandedness of the new court’s rulings. But some worry about the long-term damage of Zorkin’s political activism to the court’s impartial image and credibility.

“He may believe that it’s better to lose his judicial innocence than to stay on the heights of purity and watch the country disintegrate,” said Alexander M. Yakolev, a renowned Russian expert on constitutional law. “But the more the court is involved in politics, the less a court it becomes.”

Though heroic to many, Zorkin’s intervention in Congress last December was not entirely welcome. Andrei Golovin, leader of the Change-New Policy faction, said the court chairman lowered himself to become “just another gambler in politics.”

But Harvard Prof. Laurence Tribe, a leading specialist on American constitutional law, who visited Moscow last year at Zorkin’s request, said that Russia’s unique circumstances offer the court little choice.

“For Zorkin to have played a low-profile role would have been a prescription for oblivion,” he said. “The justifiable Russian suspicion of what goes on behind closed doors in the corridors of power would have doomed the court to a situation of very little respect and enormous cynicism had he not been so upfront.”

In recent days, Zorkin has returned to the forefront of Russian politics with a proposal that many who applauded him in December find startling.

He has asked Yeltsin and Khasbulatov, who are feuding again over what proposals to put to voters, to postpone the April constitutional referendum on the grounds that it will further destabilize Russia. He argues that the Soviet-era constitution was sufficiently amended last year to ensure separation of powers, civil rights, economic freedom and limited regional autonomy--features that might be voted down today.

In the interview, Zorkin insisted that a new constitution will take more time. He admitted that he never believed a vote should come so soon; the April referendum was just a ploy to avoid political violence in December. Today, with Russia still threatened by hyper-inflation, secessionist tendencies and voter cynicism, he said, a referendum is too risky--a position that puts him at odds with Yeltsin, who insists on going ahead with it.

“Why should we test a sick society with this referendum?” Zorkin asked. “A well-fed people may be asked to join the Maastricht Treaty (to unite Europe). But an attempt to confront a hungry people with a decision on constitutional principles, I am afraid, may be misunderstood and used by extremist forces.

“We can’t leap over an abyss,” he said, gazing up at the sun on the horizon in his landscape painting. “The reformists will suffer a defeat, and Russia will lose everything.”

* Name: Valery Dmitreievich Zorkin Age: 49 Title: Chairman of the Constitutional Court, Russia’s highest judicial authority Personal: Married to a university classmate, Tamara, now an economist. They have a daughter, Natasha, in law school. Works 12-hour days at the court but enjoys swimming, cross-country skiing, detective novels, science fiction and walking his collie. Quote: “Only a strong legal authority can save Russia. But the power of that authority is not in imposing an ‘absolute’ truth on the rest, not in crushing a political opponent. The power and wisdom of that authority is its ability to negotiate, search for and find reasonable compromises.”