Yelstin’s Hold on Power Grows More Tenuous by Day : Russia: The president is increasingly vulnerable on two fronts: the economy and on “abandoning” Serbia. Was life better under Brezhnev?

In the 1930s, Crane Brinton, a political scientist, observed that revolutions tend to follow a certain course, much like illnesses. A great many revolutions have occurred since Brinton’s book, but they have generally followed the pattern he discerned: The old regime is discredited, its replacement is ruled by moderates, who, in turn, are replaced by a more violent vein of radicals, and, in the end, the old regime is partly restored.

It now looks as though the Russian Revolution of 1991 is in danger of following Brinton’s blueprint. The moderate government of President Boris N. Yeltsin is besieged by constantly escalating challenges it is finding increasingly difficult to manage. And during the past few months, opposition forces have begun to coalesce around the Congress of People’s Deputies.

Not all the Russian government’s problems are domestic: Some of the most volatile are to be found in foreign relations. In the former Yugoslavia, for example, Yeltsin’s opponents have fastened onto the cause of the Serbs. To be sure, there are ties between Serbia and Russia that run back well before the beginning of the last century. But the anti-Yeltsin forces are now busy arguing that, because of the president’s close ties with the West, and with the United States in particular, Russia has “abandoned” Serbia. One can see graffiti scrawled in Moscow subways declaring “Long Live Serbia,” and Serb recruiters are offering a bounty of $1,500 (a considerable sum in a country where the average monthly wage is $30) to any Russian male wanting to fight for his brother Slavs. The commander of Russian volunteers in Serbia claimed in a recent interview that a full-blown war is now being waged by the Western powers against “Slavdom.”

Yeltsin is vulnerable to the charge of having abandoned Slavic, and especially Russian, interests. A recent best-seller in Russia was the memoirs of Yegor K. Ligachev, a conservative who was prominent in Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s Politburo. Ligachev devotes a large portion of his book to unrestrained vituperation against Yeltsin, blaming both him and Gorbachev for bringing about the collapse of the old Soviet Union. The secession of non-Russian republics, Ligachev and others lament, has not only stripped Moscow of its strategic territory and economic assets; it has also left about 25 million ethnic Russians “abroad”--living in former Soviet territories now independent of Russian control.

Yeltsin might be able to answer such attacks if he could point to success in the Russian economy. But he cannot. Inflation is now ripping along at more than 25% a month, and the U.S. dollar has become the almost universal currency. Young street traders walk about with huge wads of dollar bills, refusing to accept anything else in payment for goods or services. Inevitably, the weaker members of society are hurt the most as the deterioration of the former Soviet economy becomes more evident daily.

The political backlash against Yeltsin began to gather strength early last fall, about six months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The managers of large-scale, old-style military and metal-bashing industries struck first. In any genuine market economy, most of their industries would be closed down at once, since they supply virtually nothing that anybody wants--mountains of fifth-rate consumer goods, outmoded machine tools and military hardware outclassed by the latest Western fare. Managers of such factories know they cannot compete in a market system, and so they pressure the Congress of People’s Deputies to apply the brakes to privatization and modernization. They talk a great deal about adaptation and retooling, but, in fact, they want subsidies so they can continue to operate as they always have.

This managerial class, which used to be the most privileged stratum in the old Soviet Union, found ready allies in the Congress. And the political challenge to Yeltsin is made more dangerous by the fluidity of constitutional arrangements in post-Soviet Russia. It is unclear where the balance of power lies--with the president or with the people’s deputies--and since December, 1992, the Congress has been working steadily to erode Yeltsin’s power. They have done this in a variety of ways, most obviously by removing from Yeltsin’s Cabinet those individuals, such as Yegor Gaidar, most closely identified with market reforms.

In his battle with the Congress, Yeltsin is immeasurably hurt by his inability to rely on a political party for support. Given the politics of early 1992, it would have seemed divisive had he set about creating a political party structure. Yeltsin opted instead to eschew parties and adopt a broadly inclusive stance. Now, as his popularity wanes and the crisis of reform sharpens, he cannot rely on a loyal party structure within the Congress to defend him. Meanwhile, the deputies are literally irresponsible: They enjoy a platform to denounce the many ills of society, blame them all on the president and offer nothing concrete by way of solutions.

Furthermore, the elections for the Congress took place in the closing days of Gorbachev’s regime. Many of the deputies are old-line communists who would have little chance of winning genuinely free elections. They thus have a great deal of sympathy with the malcontent captains of Soviet industry and every reason to wish for Yeltsin’s failure.

The December meeting of the Congress was the first open airing of this fundamental dispute about Russia’s political future. Yeltsin came away from that challenge damaged but still in charge by threatening to take the constitutional question to the nation: He proposed a referendum, to be held in April, that would ask the Russian people whether the president should be given primacy over the Congress. If he won the vote, Yeltsin said, he would call for new elections for the Congress. If he were to lose, he would resign.

I was in Moscow that month, and there was a sense of high drama in the air: Red Square was blocked off by a phalanx of heavy trucks; police swarmed over the approaches to the Kremlin, and crowds of people gathered in the center of the city to argue heatedly the relative merits of Yeltsin and his opponents. Yeltsin survived the crisis. Although people are extremely dissatisfied with the Russian economic situation, the president still has no single challenger for leadership.

Things have again come to a head this month. Yeltsin’s popularity has continued to slide as the Russian economy shows pitifully few signs of revival. Polls are now suggesting that a large segment of the Russian populace is currently so miserable that they feel they were better off under Leonid I. Brezhnev, as bad as those times were. In this alarming situation, some enemies of Yeltsin, such as Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, the chameleon-like speaker of the Congress, have begun to believe that they might even win an electoral contest with the president.

Should they do so, the outside world can expect little more than catastrophe--a return to Soviet-style central planning is now impossible, but Yeltsin’s opponents know of nothing else. Should they come to power and fail to engineer an immediate economic improvement, as they certainly would do, they might be tempted to do what Yeltsin has not: resort to defending the interests of Russians and Slavs through armed force.

The collapse of Yeltsin’s government would once again confirm Brinton’s analysis of revolutions. It might also lead to immeasurable disaster that could make the killing in Bosnia look minuscule by comparison.