PERSPECTIVE ON RUSSIA : Yeltsin Needs a Life Raft--Now : There are a few smart, practical and cost-free things Clinton can offer as political first aid--if it’s not already too late.

The conventional wisdom in Europe, America and Asia--and even in Russia itself--is that Boris Yeltsin’s presidency is doomed. Yet the survival of Yeltsin and the Russian federation remain seriously important to Western governments, to the extent that the annual meeting of the Group of Seven, scheduled for Japan in July, may be moved up on an emergency basis to put the industrial nations’ collective strength into a strategy for aiding Russia. But Yeltsin’s predicament is so dire that day-to-day events may make the G-7 formalities moot.

Meanwhile, in four weeks, President Yeltsin is to meet with President Clinton. While no Western government is in a position to provide massive material help, there is much that the United States can do to support Russia’s survival.

The Clinton Administration was on the right track last week in suggesting support for emergency measures that Yeltsin might take to reverse the attack on democratic reforms.

Both Yeltsin and Russia are in a rolling, deepening crisis. The bones are breaking. “Autonomous republics” throughout the federation are paying less and less attention to Moscow. The popular clamor that “things were better before” grows ever louder. By the time he meets with Clinton (April 3-4) in Vancouver, Yeltsin may have had to trade off much of his pro-Western foreign policy to keep enough domestic authority to pursue even vestigial economic reforms. For example, if the army supports him against the phony and obsolete parliament, he will have become the army’s creature. This could bolster Yeltsin’s position in Russia, but he would no longer be the president he is today, and that would make it more difficult for President Clinton at Vancouver, or the G-7 at Tokyo, to promise aid for a Russia no longer clearly moving toward democracy.

Even so, the basic strategic calculus will remain the same: It is in the West’s interest not to have to live the next 75 years on the same planet with a hostile, angry, nuclear-armed nation.

We may not be able to do much to “save” Yeltsin, or to redeem Russia today, but we can certainly do something. The immediate political tasks for Clinton, therefore, are to strengthen Yeltsin, to draw in most of his opposition in support of the larger goal of maintaining Russia’s integrity and to quell the resentment in many quarters over America’s perceived failure (so far) to support Russian reforms and freedoms as much as had been hoped for.

The single most important message for the new U.S. President to get across is that it is in everyone’s interest that there be a strong Russia in the community of nations, and we will, accordingly, do what we can to help. And “we” means both political parties. This is a bipartisan American policy, and making that clear will vastly increase its strength, at home and in the eyes of the world.

As for specific Russian needs that might be addressed by the West in this context, there are three commitments that President Clinton could make to President Yeltsin at Vancouver that would serve global strategic purposes.

- The Russians are struggling on several fronts with booby traps deliberately set by Stalin to make it difficult to break up the Soviet Union and to make Moscow’s central control easier. He fiddled with borders among the Soviet Socialist Republics--now independent states; he sprinkled Russian populations into republics dominated by other ethnic groups; he fostered rigid industrial and agricultural interdependencies; he imposed a single centralized currency and credit system on all, and he and his heirs pledged the wealth of all against foreign debts undertaken in Moscow. (Yeltsin inherited the former Soviet Union’s $84-billion debt, and creditors are at a loss as to how to proceed; a dispute between Russia and Ukraine over how to divide responsibility for the debt is just one obstacle.)

If President Clinton says that he and the other G-7 leaders understand the problems and will work with Russia and the other former Soviet states, this will strengthen Yeltsin. It would be a marked difference from Washington’s previous approach.

- President Clinton might offer to help Russia create an acceptable foreign investment regime. This would strengthen those in Russia who want to attract foreign investment and those in the West who would invest far more in Russia than governments ever will. This is not an original idea; for example, Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary said at her confirmation hearings that rebuilding Russia’s oil industry will be a top priority. That will require new political, financial and legal regimes that Western investors can live with. If and when such regimes can be established, many believe that at least $100 billion will be invested in the Russian energy sector within a year.

What would be new is the U.S. government’s willingness to put its shoulder to the wheel, with the other G-7 nations and with the Russians, rather than just exhorting “market forces” to “take advantage of the market opportunities” in Russia.

- Finally, Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev is calling for Western agreement to let Russia have a designated share of the global arms market. It is in our national interest that Russia not collapse economically--and this is in the interests of France and of Britain as well. Although some parts of Russian agriculture and industry are becoming privatized, nearly half of Russia’s GDP and manufacturing jobs still depend on production of defense-related articles and systems. There are some customers, such as U.S., British and French allies in the Persian Gulf region, where arrangements might be made for sales of some Russian defense systems. Other markets, such as those in East Asia and India, where the Russians are already making substantial sales, would also have to come under cooperative political control.

Since this would adversely affect U.S. and European defense industries, President Clinton and the G-7 could simultaneously offer to fund a cooperative G-7/Russian cleanup of the 30 or so unsafe civil nuclear power reactors in Russia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania; the 300 power reactors on 160 Russian submarines that are to be decommissioned, and the 15,000 tactical nuclear warheads in Russia that are supposed to be destroyed under programs adopted by Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev.

The U.S. Congress has already appropriated $800 million for the tactical nuclear part of this project. A few billion from the G-7 over the next five to seven years would suffice for the entire civil-military nuclear cleanup. This would forestall what might become many Chernobyl-type disasters--the ultimate environmental pollution. Western industry is ready to take this on, under G-7 government contracts.

As the quintessential old Cold Warrior and now Elder Statesman Richard Nixon has said, “We did not win the Cold War, the Communists lost it. We will not have won it until economic and political freedom succeed in Russia.” The commitments the West can make at Vancouver and Tokyo cannot be fulfilled in time to secure freedom in Russia’s current crisis. But the very making of such commitments will immediately cast a powerful shadow over all Russia, just as the queen in a chess match need not take a single pawn or knight to have a decisive influence on the outcome.