Next Step : Russia: The Fight for the Kremlin : What now, Boris? The mercurial president has cast out his last excuse for failures: Parliament.

Now Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin has no more excuses.

When he was cast out of the Politburo into political darkness to emerge later as the star of Russia’s pro-democracy movement, Yeltsin blamed Mikhail S. Gorbachev and the corrupt and oppressive Soviet system itself for his country’s deepening troubles. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin complained that the Soviet-era Parliament, dominated by unrepentant Communists and neo-nationalists, was systematically sabotaging his program of reform.

Last week, in an admittedly unconstitutional gamble, Yeltsin dissolved the Parliament and called for new elections in December, thus shattering the last remaining institution of Soviet power.

In doing so, Russia’s first freely elected president in its 1,000-year history takes on a challenge of epic proportions. Yeltsin must try to build democratic institutions on Russia’s scorched and exhausted political earth. At the same time, he must push ahead with free-market economic reforms that will cause real pain for the majority of Russians, thus inviting political backlash.

If Yeltsin fails--to get a new legislature he can work with, to check Russia’s plummeting standard of living and to keep the fractious regions from winning so much autonomy that central authority collapses--he will have to shoulder most of the blame himself.

It now seems inevitable that Russia will hold both early parliamentary and early presidential elections, as Yeltsin demanded. The only question is the timing, who will win and whether the autocratic Yeltsin and his uncompromising foes will learn from their mistakes.

Even under the best of circumstances, Russia must still tame triple-digit inflation and rampant corruption, mass unemployment and a plunging standard of living. The President must also create brand new legal and financial systems before economic redevelopment can begin in earnest.

Yeltsin remains hugely popular. Sixty-two percent of 600 Russians queried in one survey last week supported his decision to dissolve Parliament, and only 14.5% opposed it.

The president also benefits from an enduring Russian tradition of blaming the bureaucracy--not the beloved czar--for the nation’s woes.

“The myth was that the czar simply didn’t know that his people were starving,” said Boris Morozov, an emigre scholar at Tel Aviv University. “It was just that he had bad advisers.” Russians still have this monarchistic streak, he said.

Yeltsin’s immediate task is to get a government--and a legislature--that will let him do at least some of what he wants.

He made progress on the first front two weeks ago by sidelining his conservative economics minister, Oleg I. Lobov, and bringing back ousted Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar, the architect of his “shock therapy” reforms.

Gaidar has said that the reformers’ primary task is to ensure that Russia’s first post-Communist parliamentary election does not produce a hostile legislature of ex-Communists, nationalists and populists who will attempt to blunt--if not block--economic reform.

Though his foes demand simultaneous elections, Yeltsin insists he will not compromise. He has decreed parliamentary elections for Dec. 11-12--a schedule that leaves little time for either side to organize. He also has announced presidential elections for next June 12--two years earlier than scheduled.

Although Russia has parliamentary factions galore, its political parties are still in the formative stages. Russian intellectuals are well acquainted with the idea of a national political organization capable of recruiting like-minded candidates in local regions, giving them money and support and helping them identify and then turn out their voters on election day. But they’ve had little experience in putting these ideas to work. “Grass-roots politics does not come naturally there,” said Harvard University economist Jeffrey Sachs, a Yeltsin government adviser in a telephone interview from Cambridge, Mass.

“For the reformers to have a good Parliament, they’re going to have to work at it--and I can’t say that we have strong evidence that they’re going to be organized and ready to do that,” Sachs said.

Pollster Grigory A. Pashkov worries not about a “red-brown coalition” of Communists and fascists but about a brand-new Parliament of amateurs who will have to learn politics and lawmaking from scratch.

“The lawmakers will be worse than they are now,” Pashkov predicted glumly. “They will be completely unprepared. We are destroying the old political elite faster than we create a new one.”

Many analysts expect a new legislature as diverse, as fractious, as hard to govern as Russia herself.

“There are dozens of parties and about 100 regions and 100 nationalities in Russia,” said Alexander I. Pikayev of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, a Moscow think tank. “It would be very difficult to transform this very diverse Parliament into a rubber-stamp.”

Some members of the dissolved Congress of People’s Deputies are likely to boycott the election entirely--particularly if Yeltsin continues to shut down their newspapers and muzzle their voices on television.

In one of the most heavy-handed of Yeltsin’s moves last week, the head of his State Inspectorate for Defense of Freedom of the Press warned Wednesday, one day after the Supreme Soviet had impeached Yeltsin, that newspapers and other media could be shut down if they called for the president’s removal.

“Yeltsin may win, but only temporarily,” fumed centrist lawmaker Andrei L. Golov in. “You can’t make history with dirty hands.”

“Under no circumstances will I take part in this farce,” agreed Oleg V. Plotnikov, until recently a Yeltsin loyalist. “The elections will undoubtedly be held under presidential control . . . (including) control over a significant part of the mass media.”

Yeltsin’s critics note that the Parliament he disbanded last week idolized him just two years ago.

Yeltsin’s archenemy, Parliament Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, was once so loyal to the president that White House wags dubbed him him “Faithful Ruslan.” The nickname came from a satiricle Soviet-era dissident novel about a prison camp dog named Ruslan who loyally guarded the gulag until the 1950s thaw created canine unemployment. When Khasbulatov first criticized Yeltsin in early 1992, one newspaper headlined its story “Faithful Ruslan Bites His Master.”

Unless Yeltsin changes the autocratic style he acquired during his 30-year career as a party boss, critics warn that he may alienate the new legislature as fast as he did the old one.

Yeltsin’s script for the next few months changes daily as he negotiates with his opponents. According to the latest reports, Yeltsin wants December elections for a lower house, or Duma, the old Russian word for legislature. The exact number of lawmakers it would include and the mechanism for their election are unclear.

The 178-member upper house, called a Federation Council, would be made up of the executive and legislative heads of each of Russia’s 89 regions. The scheme is somewhat as if the U.S. Senate were to consist of the governors and legislative Speakers of each of the 50 states--except that these governors would be appointed by Yeltsin.

Yeltsin hopes that a new legislature will adopt his draft of a new constitution and pass sweeping legislation to re-create the legal system and enable economic reform.

But the newly elected lawmakers may not be so pliant. They may not hasten, for example, to adopt a Yeltsin constitution giving the president more power than the Parliament.

Yeltsin also expects the legislature to adopt a new law on presidential elections, which he insists will be held June 12. Most of the candidates who might oppose Yeltsin are men in their 30s and 40s--a big departure from the Soviet tradition of much older leaders.

Among those who may run are Grigory A. Yavlinsky, 41, an economist best known as the author of Gorbachev’s 500-day economic plan; Deputy Prime Minister Sergei M. Shakhrai, 37, who has said he will be president someday, but seems to have backtracked on challenging Yeltsin; Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, 47, Russia’s best-known fascist, who got 7% of the vote when he ran against Yeltsin in 1991; Mikhail A. Bocharov, 57, a former oil executive turned private businessman and Sergei N. Baburin, 34, an ultra-nationalist.

Yeltsin himself had originally said he would serve out his term, which ends in 1996, and retire from politics. Now he has indicated he will run.

What worries nearly everyone is any deterioration in Yeltsin’s health, which has been the subject of as much rumor, propaganda and innuendo as that of any previous Kremlin leader.

If Yeltsin were to die or resign unexpectedly for health reasons--especially now that the status of the vice president and the constitution are unclear--a dreadful power struggle might ensue.

Russia’s two-year political paralysis has already exhausted, impoverished or demoralized many Russians, leaving them to limp toward what they hope will be democracy.

Some are gloomy as only Russians can be.

In an interview published on the day Yeltsin dissolved Parliament, the exiled writer Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn warned of coming chaos.

“There will not be peace on earth,” he said. “Don’t expect that the Cold War has ended, and now a happy epoch is beginning. It will be a very difficult epoch. The dark forces will rise, and there will be fearsome clashes.”

To many, Yeltsin’s attempt to create democracy by disbanding one of its central institutions--however flawed--creates a dangerous precedent in a country whose leaders have never submitted themselves to the rule of law. Yeltsin may be a democrat, they say, but his successor might not.

Constitutional Court Chairman Valery D. Zorkin complained that Yeltsin’s decree concentrates all power in one person’s hands, at least temporarily.

Some worry that if its leaders cannot agree to share power and go to work on the economy, Russia may end up resembling some Latin American countries, with constant political instability, chronic inflation, debt crises, capital flight and a widening gap between rich entrepreneurs and an impoverished lower class.

Gaidar on Sunday expressed concerns that economic reform might take a back seat to politics during a long campaign season. Reformers, already accused of being insensitive to the suffering their policies are causing, would have to try to quash Russia’s inflation without creating the mass unemployment and plunging standard of living that would hurt their election chances.

If the elections produce political stability, then even a conservative legislature would be an advance, said Charles Blitzer, chief economist in the World Bank’s Moscow office.

“But in the short term, I would hope that in the run-up to elections, we don’t see a campaign run heavily on populist slogans and promises to spend money Russia doesn’t have,” Blitzer said.

Other people think inertia will keep Russia stuck in its centuries-old political bog.

Political analyst Andrei V. Vasilevsky said he expects change to come slowly. Moscow will likely have to delegate broad powers to the regions, but that could mean more freedom and local initiative, not the disintegration and ruin Moscow fears.

“Way too many people in this country are still nostalgic for the strong arm of Big Brother,” Vasilevsky said. In a year’s time, he predicted, “Russia will be much more depoliticized, and freer.”

Yeltsin’s Drama--and the Understudies

If the president fails, there are several who might be willing to take his place.