Did Yeltsin Do Away With Democracy--or the Relics of Communism? : He Crushes All Power but His Own : Autocrat: True to his communist beginnings, Yeltsin continues to squash anyone with the temerity to oppose him.

What do we do when Boris N. Yeltsin dies? Given the man’s uncertain health and intemperate habits, that is a question of some urgency. The Clinton Administration has gambled billions of taxpayer dollars, nuclear-arms control and the stability of one-sixth of the world on a model of autocratic rule that will come back to haunt.

With our full blessing, Yeltsin has destroyed any power other than his own. That’s what it means to abolish the vice presidency, parliament, the constitutional court and all media outlets that dare question him.

In the process, he has marginalized or imprisoned every person who might provide alternative leadership, beginning with Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the man who brought freedom to Russia. Can you imagine the outrage in the West if Gorbachev had dared to fire on the White House when Yeltsin established his rival rump government in that same building? The difference, Yeltsin apologists insist, is that their man was elected. But he was first elected by the very parliament that he recently abolished.

And what of Alexander V. Rutskoi, later elected vice president on the same ballot as Yeltsin, who now languishes in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer in a KGB jail? The Western media have blindly endorsed Yeltsin’s claim that his most popular rival is nothing more than a “communist/fascist.” The man who helped save Yeltsin’s life by organizing the defense of the White House during the 1991 coup attempt and broke with him over the pace of economic change is condemned as not merely wrong, but evil. Remember that the denigration of the vice president and parliament began long before the recent violence.

This 46-year-old, twice-captured Afghan War veteran, never a party functionary, is now routinely described in the Western media--along with anyone else who dares buck Yeltsin--as a member of the communist old guard. Orwellian? How easy it is to forget that it was Yeltsin, 62, who spent most of his adult life as a communist boss giving orders to people like Rutskoi. Yeltsin remains a Bolshevik pure and simple, believing that the end justifies the means. He invokes the spirit of democratic centralism while destroying all who dare depart from the obviously correct path. Yeltsin has surrounded himself with politically non-threatening technocrats; he has tolerated not a single individual who could possibly succeed him as a leader with public support.

By mindlessly supporting every twist and turn in Yeltsin’s rise to czar, the United States has mocked democracy. This country, Clinton should be reminded, was built on the notion that autocratic rule is neither just nor stable.

Yeltsin is already proving to be neither because power does corrupt. The checks and balances of parliaments and courts may slow things down, but in the long run they are far more efficient. Yeltsin once held total power in an important province of the old Soviet Union and it was hardly a model of effective economy or freedom.

By holding up the primitive ideology of laissez - faire economics as the touchstone of a free society, we are sending exactly the wrong message to the world: a message betraying our complex struggle for freedom, which was fueled by labor struggles and social-justice movements, not simply the free market. Our system succeeds not because government was eliminated but because ordinary citizens got to use government to redress their grievances--including those arising in the marketplace, ranging from the exploitation of child labor to the rape of the environment.

Standing the idea of democracy on its head, the Clinton Administration has said process means nothing as long as Yeltsin seems to be taking his country to a capitalist economy. Will we stick with him even if the voters recoil from shock therapy as they did in the recent Polish election, and elect those who prefer a mixed economy? Does this Administration prefer the Chinese model, which weds tight authoritarian rule with the world’s most rapidly expanding capitalist market system? Far better to do nothing than to pretend to be the champion of freedom while rationalizing--and financing--its destruction.