Yeltsin Counting on Clinton to Help Save Political Life : Russia: Besieged leader needs to bring some bacon home from summit to boost his chances in referendum.

Russia’s foreign minister likens him to Gulliver, a giant plagued by Lilliputians. To his enemies, the president is more like a cross between a bully and the village drunk.

Whatever Russians’ views, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, so far the only democratically chosen leader in their 1,000-year-old history, is running for his political life, pursued by a growing army of ultranationalists, reactionaries and Marxist-Leninists.

Yeltsin’s reformist policies have brought Russia closer than ever to what people here wistfully call “normal civilized countries.” But the former Communist apparatchik has also presided over the smashing of an economic machine that took seven decades and tens of millions of lives to build.

“What can I tell you--we have lived through a difficult period which began on June 12, 1991,” an uncharacteristically contrite Yeltsin told a crowd of Muscovites last Sunday, recalling the date of his election. “Difficult from every point of view, difficult for the residents of Russia and for the president.”

The strapping, silver-haired former farm boy from the Urals with a taste for volleyball and vodka flies to Vancouver, Canada, for a Saturday meeting with President Clinton that follows what is arguably the worst month of his life.

Yeltsin’s mother died and the Congress of People’s Deputies failed by only 72 votes to oust him from office. And a fumbling speech that he made and that was televised across 11 time zones convinced many Russians that their head of state was either ill or soused.

People that Yeltsin once thought he could count on--his vice president, national security adviser and his former deputy in Parliament--have publicly turned against him.

Now, three weeks before a national referendum that could effectively end modern Russia’s most amazing political career, Yeltsin and his entourage are counting on Clinton for both a display of support and some bacon they can bring home to the electorate.

“At the summit, Clinton must clearly express his backing for an embattled Yeltsin,” said Father Gleb Yakunin, a Russian Orthodox priest who is one of the president’s closest allies in the legislature. “It would be good for Yeltsin and democracy if Clinton mentioned a concrete figure the U.S.A. is ready to urgently give Russia.”

Yet to avoid criticism by nationalists at home, Yeltsin must not appear supplicant or too dependent on the West. A Moscow-based Western diplomat observed of Yeltsin at the summit: “He can’t go cup in hand. But he has to leave with something in the cup.”

It is proof of the uproarious state of Russia’s politics that in Yeltsin’s Kremlin office, workers admitted that, with only three days to go to the summit, the schedule of the boss had not yet been fixed. Whenever it does happen, Yeltsin’s departure with wife, Naina, aboard the presidential Ilyushin jet carries an element of risk.

Clinton can go to Canada knowing that Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Colin L. Powell or Vice President Al Gore will not form a cabal against him back in Washington. But Yeltsin must be more prudent and is expected to leave in command Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, who proved his loyalty this past week.

Yeltsin’s last trip abroad, to China last December, was cut short by a Cabinet reshuffle in Moscow, and he had to fly home early.

On the arduous road to winning the Democratic presidential nomination last year, Clinton liked to call himself the “comeback kid.” On the campus of the University of British Columbia, he will be face-to-face with the only major political figure ever to pull off a political comeback in the Soviet Union.

“Stalin used to have redundant politicians shot . . . but times have changed,” Yeltsin has observed wryly.

Fired in disgrace as Moscow Communist Party boss in 1987, Yeltsin’s popularity soared among the common people because he lashed out at party privileges. When the first free elections since the Russian Revolution were held in 1989 to fill a new Soviet Parliament, Yeltsin got more votes than anybody else. The former leading Communist had become Russia’s No. 1 demokrat. Two years later, he was elected its first president.

In one sense, Yeltsin has turned out to be the antithesis of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whom he replaced at the apex of the Kremlin pyramid when the Soviet Union collapsed in December, 1991. And that is a large part of Yeltsin’s difficulty now.

As Soviet leader, Gorbachev breathed liberty into his fear-stricken country and rebuilt its politics to introduce a measure of democracy. But when the crunch came, this dyed-in-the-wool Communist could not bring himself to abandon Marxist economics.

Starting 15 months ago, Yeltsin tore with gusto into the machinery of communism, freeing most prices and launching Russia on a wide-ranging selloff of government assets. But for the most part, he left the political institutions he inherited from Soviet days intact.

That may have been a fateful error, since the Congress, a creation of the Gorbachev years designed as a blend of Communist Party supremacy and democratic rule, has become the nemesis of Yeltsin’s presidency and reform program.

Yakunin now worries that with Yeltsin out of the country, Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, Yeltsin’s former deputy when he was the chairman of Russia’s Parliament, may attempt to summon an emergency session of the Congress to resume the attack on Yeltsin.

From abroad, the struggle in Moscow often gets depicted in cartoon terms of good guys vs. bad guys. But as far as Yeltsin’s record as a leader is concerned, if Russia were Britain or Italy, he would likely have been tossed out by Parliament long ago.

Russia’s consumer price index has gone up at least 20-fold in a year, while wages have only risen 12-fold. Under Yeltsin, Russia’s economy has been imploding, with production last year shrinking by 20%. Output sank in every sector, natural gas excepted.

Worst of all, yesterday’s Communist maverick and street hero is seen by many Russians as having lost control of events and as lacking a coherent plan for the future. At times, such as during the four-day Congress, he is erratic and subject to mood swings.

True, there is now much wider political and economic liberty in Russia. But the Yeltsin months have also brought increasing crime, a plummeting standard of living for many and uncertainty about what lies ahead.

Yeltsin recently said he feels like he is at Stalingrad, referring to World War II siege of that city, now called Volgograd, by German forces in the fall and winter of 1942-43.

His back is to the wall, and he’s fighting against enormous odds.

His enemies are delighted.

“The president is living his last days, or months,” gloats a conservative deputy, Mikhail Chelnokov, one of the first to formally demand his impeachment. “The referendum will be the last move toward his complete failure.”

All events, the summit included, will now be measured in Moscow by how they affect Yeltsin’s chances in the April vote. And, as in 1987, when he lost his party jobs, the more he is under attack, the better it is for his chances; that is what has been described as the “Yeltsin phenomenon.”

At any rate, Yeltsin is not a man to fold under pressure, as a story from his autobiography shows: While a student, Yeltsin rode around the Soviet Union on the roof of passenger trains. Once, he was joined by prisoners newly freed from labor camps, who insisted he play cards. Yeltsin had never played before in his life. But he agreed, and promptly began losing his clothes--hat, shirt, trousers--to the winners. Soon, the future leader of Russia was in his underpants.

“Now we’ll play for your life,” the prisoners told him. “If you lose this time, we’ll throw you off the roof of this coach while the train’s moving.”

Undaunted, Yeltsin kept playing.

And he began winning.