Boris the Blunderer : While One Boris Yeltsin Moves Dynamically on Problems Like a Stalinesque Shock Worker, the Other, Like the Timeless Peasant Vanya, Passively Lets Opportunities Slide. Either Way, All Russia Trembles.

His eyes narrowed in a Tatar-like squint, a roguish smile on his lips, the master of the Kremlin could not conceal his mood of triumph. His opponents, he said, had “reached their last 100 meters after running 3,000” and were huffing on their last breath.

“Now there is a clear authority, and this authority is acting,” a hulking Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, in his shirt sleeves, his beefy arms flapping to emphasize a point, assured a nationwide TV audience from his Kremlin sanctum on Sept. 26. “And it is acting resolutely.” Five days earlier, he had dissolved the Russian legislature, which then defiantly elected Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi as “acting president” and holed up in its gleaming white headquarters while supporters by the thousands rallied behind barricades.

It was not until this month that Yeltsin won his long-distance race. His military had to bombard the riverside building with 122-millimeter tank shells to bring his supposedly winded foes to heel. In the pitched battle that left the four upper stories of the so-called White House an ugly black, more people perished or were wounded in armed combat in the heart of Moscow than at any time since the Great October Revolution of 1917. Like his czarist predecessors, who summoned the Cossacks and their horsewhips to disperse striking workers or restive peasants, Yeltsin’s last and best argument for his legitimacy was naked force.

Yeltsin, his 28-month-old presidency salvaged by tanks and troops, had triumphed. But he had been wrong in his predictions, embarrassingly and publicly incorrect yet again in his assessment of the politics and social life of this country for which he once seemed to have a mysterious, intuitive grasp. “It seems we have something in our bloodstream that makes us overestimate our hopes and find ourselves hostages to them,” the presidential chief of staff, Sergei A. Filatov, reflected during the siege of the White House. For many Russians, Filatov’s words would be an apt summary--perhaps the epitaph--of the Yeltsin era.

For months, there had been a pervasive sense that things were going awry, that the experiment with democracy and a supply-and-demand economy was, as Russians say, “going off the rails.” Intrigue was replacing governance, and corruption was so rife that government ministers were telling journalists that they had opened overseas bank accounts. And as in the twilight of Leonid I. Brezhnev’s 18-year reign, rumors were flying that the man in the Kremlin was ill, perhaps dying. Yeltsin and his followers put most of the blame for Russia’s woes squarely on the uneasy but virulent alliance of rabble-rousing Communists and Western-hating nationalists who had come to control the two-tiered Parliament--the Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet--and who were checkmating the president’s reform agenda.

Yeltsin, the 62-year-old son of a Urals bricklayer, had been such a populist phenomenon in 1989 that he won a niche in the Guinness Book of Records under “highest personal majority,” for obtaining 5,118,745 of 5,722,937 votes cast in his bid to represent Moscow in the Soviet Parliament. But three weeks ago, his key constituency was a force of 10 tanks.

The bloodshed of this October may have been inevitable, given the unique political and institutional environment of post-Soviet Russia. Here, unlike in Moscow’s former Eastern European satellites, there was no wholesale purge of apparatchiks or the 19 million card-carrying Communists who made the old machine run (Yeltsin, of course, had been a leading Communist Party official himself).

But the roots of Yeltsin’s predicament go far deeper than a recalcitrant Parliament turned violently rebellious, and many of his troubles are of his own making. Two years ago, the husky Siberian’s courage stirred the world as he marshaled the defense of democracy behind flimsy barricades at the same marble-faced building that he ordered stormed this month. What happened in this powerful country whose stability is vital to the whole world?

“Yeltsin committed more mistakes than even his opponents could have hoped for,” says historian Yuri N. Afanasiev, a comrade-in-arms during the early days. Yeltsin’s political touch has been wanting, his economic vision blurred. The bill for many of those blunders came due this month.

The president promised his people prosperity, but he now presides over a country where, according to his own government’s statistics, half of all families with children now live below the official poverty line. A “reformer” and a “democrat,” he can be as brutal with allies and adversaries as any neo-Bolshevik, and he has created many of his own worst enemies--the leaders of the failed 1993 October Revolution among them. He has an economic dream for Russia that includes the supermarkets that left him slack-jawed with awe on visits to America, but he has lacked an effective strategy for bringing it to life.

In spite of his mistakes, Yeltsin still commands considerable support in Russia. Early opinion polls in Moscow on the day of the storming of the White House showed 72% of the people surveyed siding with Yeltsin rather than his lawmaker enemies. But will Yeltsin be able to capitalize on this? Already this year, he has squandered one popular mandate, the overwhelming vote of confidence he received in a nationwide referendum in April. Rock-solid in adversity, Yeltsin has a proven penchant for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, then summoning tremendous reserves of inner strength to turn the tables again.

THE HISTORY OF THE YELTSIN PRESIDENCY, HISTORIAN AFANASIEV SUMMARIZES tartly, is the history of the president’s mistakes. The genesis of his biggest blunder came when his presidency was only four months old, and the leaves of the ghostly birches ringing Moscow were turning gold. In Government Dacha No. 15 at Archangelskoye, in the wooded hills near the Moscow River, a group of young men, their average age 35, assembled with dread and excitement in their souls to discuss how to do away with socialism. If genes play a role in economics, their leader was an improbable figure indeed. Yegor Timurovich Gaidar was a rumpled, roly-poly academic with soft brown hair and a face as rotund as a pumpkin. Among free marketeers, his pedigree was unique: his paternal grandfather had enlisted in the Red Army at 14, rose to command a regiment and had a Marxist muse who inspired him to pen a children’s classic of collectivist morality, “Timur and His Team.”

Gaidar came into the Yeltsin circle almost by chance, he says. On the first day of the failed August, 1991, hard-line Communist putsch in the last months of the U.S.S.R., the young economist, head of a Moscow-based think tank, hurried to the White House with other pro-reform figures to show support for Russian President Yeltsin. While awaiting an armored attack that never came, Gaidar made the acquaintance of Yeltsin’s closest adviser, Gennady E. Burbulis. That autumn, as it became obvious that the Soviet Union, its government and economy were doomed, it was Burbulis who spurred work on economic-reform blueprints and who attended interminable skull sessions, bringing along other figures from the Russian government.

As the academics debated, the Soviet state-run economy--which had supplied the Red Army with Katyusha rockets against the Nazis, which had put the first man and woman in space, but which couldn’t produce a decent pocket calculator--was perishing. The fear of a cold, hungry and restive winter loomed.

“It was a crucial situation, and quite a few people were panic-stricken,” Gaidar recalls. His response was to enunciate two goals. First, to stimulate output and curtail the shortages that made the Russian consumer’s life an eternal purgatory spent waiting in line, Gaidar wanted to abolish government-fixed prices on virtually everything from four-door Zhiguli sedans to canned eggplant. Increasing taxes and cutting state spending would also stabilize the economy.

Second, Gaidar hoped to lay the institutional groundwork for privatizing Russia’s state-owned enterprises and stores and forming a nationwide marketplace of independent buyers and sellers, with the exact model to be decided upon later. The pudgy theoretician wanted Russia to make a clean break with his grandfather’s credo.

Yeltsin and Gaidar’s inability to bring off a rapid, if painful, restructuring of Russia’s economy has been, it is now clear, the most far-reaching and fateful error of the Yeltsin years, and it badly weakened Yeltsin’s political base. The president, who as a boy lived in a workers’ barracks so cold that he kept from freezing only by sleeping with the family goat, staked his future on achieving a better lot for Russians, and fast. “I want their lives to improve before my own eyes, that is the most important thing,” he once said.

In November, 1991, the hour for young, Westernizing reformers sounded in Russia. Moscow’s equivalent of the Clinton “baby boomers” moved into the former Communist Party Central Committee offices near Red Square. Gaidar, who became deputy prime minister for economic reforms, and his labor minister, energy minister, social services minister and top official for privatization were all born in the early to mid-1950s. Supreme Soviet Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, a brooding economist who would turn into one of Yeltsin’s most implacable enemies, scowled and declared that Russia was in the hands of “kids.” True enough. Some of the Russian “thirtysomethings,” like foreign trade commissioner Pyotr O. Aven, had done virtually nothing but earn diplomas and push pencils in ivory-tower institutes.

“None of these democrats could have answered how much vegetable oil Muscovites need, when it should be purchased, etc.” complained Gavriil K. Popov, an economist and Yeltsin ally who was then Moscow’s mayor. Gaidar knew the scale of the difficulties ahead; he described himself as the head of a “kamikaze government.”

On Jan. 2, 1992, prices were deregulated on most manufactured goods and foodstuffs. The invisible hand of the market, not an army of bureaucrats, was now supposed to determine the value of things. “Had we taken this path two or three years ago, we would be living a normal life by now,” Yeltsin reassured a crowd as he toured industrial cities in the Volga valley that month. But by November, prices had soared by almost 22 times while wages had increased only tenfold. Privatization, the other pillar of Gaidar’s plan, proceeded painfully: at the end of the third quarter, a scant 5% (not the anticipated 50% to 60%) of Russia’s small trade and service establishments had been sold into private hands. The year, a chastened Yeltsin said, had turned into the most searing trial his countrymen had undergone since the Nazi invasion.

Some economists believe Gaidar went too far too fast, others (Gaidar included) that he wasn’t bold enough. Judy Shelton, a supply-side economist for the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, believes Yeltsin, like former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, fell into the seductive trap of counting on billions of dollars in Western aid and wrongly re-tailored his agenda to conform to the International Monetary Fund formulas. To maintain the budget deficit recommended by the IMF, Russia had to keep most of its state-run stores and factories generating revenue, which meant slowing down privatization. Gaidar, who was sacrificed by Yeltsin last December and restored to the Russian Cabinet last month, now has the advantage of hindsight. Russia wrongly kept printing rubles for itself and other ex-Soviet republics, he says, losing control of its money supply.

But the biggest error, Gaidar believes, the mistake that would stymie his entire program, was motivated in the beginning by a mighty force that has so often frustrated ambitions in Russia: the weather. After pitched arguments in the Cabinet, and against Gaidar’s own wishes, the 1992 price reforms were drafted to exclude oil and other energy sources. “There was a strong argument against. January in Russia is the peak of the heating season,” Gaidar explains. “We were afraid that while producers and consumers were haggling, supplies would be cut off and several cities would freeze.”

Fearing the social and political consequences of depriving millions of Russians of heat, the cabinet elected to postpone deregulation of energy prices until spring. But when the snows melted, they bared a greatly altered political landscape in Russia. A center-right coalition, alarmed at the gap between the reformers’ vision and the harm wrought on the Soviet-built industrial complex, had jelled in Parliament, and its leaders warned direly that freeing prices on energy would make prices across the board soar by another 1,000%. Obviously shaken by the first results of “shock therapy,” Yeltsin tried to forge a coalition with old-style, Communist-schooled industrialists, appointing some of them to the government. The wide-eyed, confident period of economic reform was over, and a period of half-measures began, which included outlays of huge subsidies to money-losing enterprises, eliminating the need to compete and staying the invisible hand of market economics.

The social and political repercussions from Russians’ dashed hopes (they had admittedly been wildly inflated to begin with) were enormous. One could see some of “shock therapy’s” victims rampaging through the streets of Moscow this month, the confused and angry who want a return to the days of 13-kopeck loaves of bread and labor-camp sentences for “speculators.” Many of them elderly, most of them impoverished, these economic losers became the foot soldiers and the sympathizers of anti-Yeltsin politicos as the average salary plummeted in buying power by 41% in one year.

But it was Yeltsin’s presidency, his authority and credibility, that suffered the most from his shock therapy. “People were just not psychologically prepared for the hardships, for such a dramatic dwindling in living standards,” admits Igor A. Kharichev, an aide to the president’s chief of staff. “People naively believed that with the demise of such concepts as communism and socialism, more sausage would automatically appear on the shelves.” Like Leo Tolstoy’s tragic heroine Anna Karenina, Yeltsin vowed at one point to throw himself on the railroad tracks if the economy didn’t stabilize by year’s end. It didn’t, and he didn’t.

CAST IN AMERICAN TERMS, WHAT HAPPENED POLITICALLY TO YELTSIN over the past two years is the Russian equivalent of a submachine-gun-wielding Vice President Gore, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and many other highly placed Administration officials turning on President Clinton.

Former U.S. Ambassador Robert S. Strauss Jr., a savvy student of power on both sides of the Atlantic, has admiringly termed Yeltsin “one hell of a politician,” but the rapid unraveling of his team and this month’s blood-stained drama in Moscow suggest that the opposite is true. Policy disputes and ripening personal ambitions have played a part in the defections from Yeltsin’s ranks, but the intuitive populist who once choked Moscow’s Manezh Square with hundreds of thousands of supporters has proven singularly ham-handed at the back-room task of keeping a ruling coalition together.

After all, the masterminds of the bid to depose Yeltsin were not revenge-minded leaders of the old Soviet Communist Party, but Khasbulatov, Yeltsin’s former deputy who succeeded him as chairman of the Supreme Soviet, and Yeltsin’s own vice president, Maj. Gen. Rutskoi. There is a definite pattern here, one that disturbs Yeltsin loyalists. “Of all the people who helped him climb the Kremlin wall, none is left,” says Mikhail A. Bocharov, one of the defectors, with just a pinch of hyperbole. The still-bitter Bocharov, 52, should know. He was one of the morning stars of Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms. In the summer of 1990, Bocharov and Yeltsin discussed daily how they would uncouple Russia from the crumbling Soviet economy and who would get ministerial portfolios if Yeltsin could win election as chairman of Russia’s legislature.

“Boris Nikolayevich gave his word to me, and also to coal miners and industrialists, that I would be prime minister,” Bocharov says. The masonry manufacturer, who carried an icon of Jesus Christ and a roll of U.S. greenbacks in his pocket to show he was no run-of-the-mill Soviet bureaucrat, drew up a program to sweep Russia to capitalism in 500 days.

That vision was fated to remain a mere historical footnote. Yeltsin did squeak by with a four-vote margin to become chairman of the Supreme Soviet on May 29, 1990. But when the time came to endorse Bocharov for the premiership, Yeltsin kept mum, his then-colleague recalls. During a 30-minute break between rounds of balloting, Yeltsin offered Bocharov the post of first deputy premier--in a government to be headed by old-style Soviet technocrat Ivan S. Silayev. Furious, Bocharov refused, and another ally was on the way to becoming an enemy.

In the past two years, powerful defectors from the Yeltsin camp have included the former justice minister, the former Security Council secretary, the former security minister, the Constitutional Court chairman and many others. “There are so few of us left that each is gold,” says Burbulis, Yeltsin’s former state secretary, with a pang of regret. Ironically, it is Burbulis’ high-handed and Machiavellian maneuverings that some defectors see as the most stinging blow to the unity of Russian reformers.

But Yeltsin himself must shoulder a large part of the blame for the exodus of his supporters. He was born in a society where the word kompromiss was most frequently translated as “sell-out.” As regional party boss in his native Sverdlovsk region, he was toughness personified. While chief of the 80,000-square-mile district, he forced through construction of a highway from the main city to the north, with each local leader responsible for his own section. On the day the road was to be completed, Yeltsin picked up the local bosses in a bus and set out on the highway. If a section was not finished, Yeltsin made the offending leader get out. How he got back to Sverdlovsk was his problem.

Economist and Yeltsin crony Popov says that leaders like Yeltsin, whose formative management experience came in the Communist system, came to believe that “subordinates must obey them automatically, that one is no different from another and that each can be instantly replaced at any moment.” Georgy A. Satarov, of Yeltsin’s advisory Presidential Council, said in a moment of illuminating candor that his boss, who claims to be Russia’s No. 1 democrat, “has no understanding of what a political coalition is or what sacrifices it requires.”

Yeltsin’s inability to control and hold the center of Russian politics is highlighted by his dealings with the Civic Union, a moderate group dominated by factory directors and other managers whose primary concern was not reviving Marxism-Leninism but keeping the Uralmash heavy-machinery plant or the Kamaz truck plant supplied with rolled steel or electricity and finding new markets as the centralized Soviet economy collapsed around their ears. Instead, Yeltsin mocked their “appetite” for Cabinet jobs and at least one crony called the group’s leader a hard-line Communist. Such antagonistic, divisive tactics helped drive the Civic Union into opposition.

There is also strong evidence that Yeltsin has been willing to protect cronies suspected of corruption, a tactic that further whittled down the ranks of his supporters. When Yuri Y. Boldyrev, a likable St. Petersburg reformer named to head the Control Administration in Yeltsin’s office, launched a probe of suspicious cases of privatization in Moscow (including the sale of the Luzhniki Olympic-class stadium complex for the ludicrous ruble equivalent of $90,000), Yeltsin told him to his face, “We support (current Moscow Mayor Yuri M.) Luzhkov. Halt the investigation.”

Yeltsin’s failings as a personnel manager reached their nadir with the alienation, and finally the armed mutiny, of Vice President Rutskoi, who hunkered down in the Parliament during this month’s rebellion, vowing to resist Yeltsin’s “fascist regime” with his Kalashnikov. In the end, he was arrested and clapped in Lefortovo prison, ending a political marriage that had originally seemed a masterstroke for the president.

Yeltsin, Russia’s preeminent foe of the status quo, was running against five other candidates for the presidency when, in May, 1991, he invited Rutskoi, then 44, a decorated Hero of the Soviet Union and head of the reformist Communists for Democracy faction, to be his running mate. At first, Rutskoi said this year, he refused, objecting that “I won’t fit in.” Yeltsin then gave him a copy of his platform. The brushy-mustached Afghan War veteran came back the next day, won over. “I could put my own signature on the program,” he said.

Yeltsin, reinforced by a running mate more palatable to otherwise hostile constituencies such as Communist Party members and the military brass, won a smashing 57.3% of the vote in the first presidential election ever held in Russia. However, it wasn’t long before Rutskoi, who on the campaign trail cautioned that marketization needed to be gradual (“not everybody is capable of earning a living”), made it clear he intended to be more than a U.S.-style veep. “When President Yeltsin proposed that I be his vice president, he should have been aware that, in fact, he was proposing a political coalition,” Rutskoi said later. It was equally obvious that Yeltsin, and especially Burbulis and other members of his entourage, thought Rutskoi was of no greater moment than the czarist naval captain, second grade, who in a tale by 19th-Century writer Anton Chekhov is invited to a wedding reception solely to brighten it with his uniform.

In December, 1991, six months after the election, it was abruptly announced that Rutskoi was being removed by presidential decree from the chairmanship of five special government committees. The blunt-tongued combat pilot who began high office by criticizing Gaidar’s policies as an inhumane “experiment” ended up branding Yeltsin a lush and a crook. Their parting of the ways climaxed in the absurdity of Rutskoi’s claiming the mantle of “acting president” and his exhortation to followers this month to storm a Moscow broadcast center, oppose the “virtually fascist regime” of Yeltsin and revive the Soviet Union.

None of this had to happen, some members of Yeltsin’s entourage admit. Politicians who know Rutskoi doubt he has the stuff of a true statesman--Popov says he brings to government the shoot-first reflexes of an aviation cadet. But when one listens to this telegenic former pilot’s complaints, it is painfully obvious that the deepest roots of his revolt lie not in policy disagreements but in his rankling resentment at having been treated like Chekhov’s captain.

IN THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE’S CHAMBER, DECORATED WITH STALINESQUE statuary of heroic workers and peasants, Yeltsin, on Oct. 21, 1987, crossed his personal Rubicon. Before a session of the Soviet Communist leadership, he charged that a cult was forming around General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and he even took the astonishing step of criticizing Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, for being too influential.

The next four years in Russia became an increasingly personalized struggle for power between Gorbachev and his former protege. After the abortive 1991 putsch, the alternatives couldn’t have seemed starker: It was the common people and Russia, the wellsprings of Yeltsin’s power, versus the moribund Soviet Union and discredited Communist Party hierarchy headed by Gorbachev. “It was clear to me that the vertical bureaucratic pivot on which the country rests had to be destroyed,” Yeltsin said.

But the real target of choice, it is clear, was the Soviet and Communist Party leader, Gorbachev. At a recent luncheon, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the former West German foreign minister, turned to Yevgeny A. Ambartsumov, chairman of the Russian legislature’s foreign affairs committee, and asked, “Why did you destroy the Soviet Union?”

“To get rid of Gorbachev,” the pro-Yeltsin lawmaker remembers answering. By demonizing the Soviet Union and its Communist leader, the Yeltsin camp ignored the contradictions in Russia’s own institutions. They failed to anticipate the unpeaceful coexistence of a president chosen through popular suffrage and the same pyramid of elected councils that had been used by Bolsheviks to come to power. At the councils’ apex was the Parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies, by law the supreme organ of state power--and almost completely dominated by Communist Party members.

Yeltsin, perhaps, was caught in a trap. Though the Parliament adopted a declaration of “sovereignty” for Russia by a 544-271 margin when it convened in the Grand Kremlin Palace for its maiden session, Yeltsin knew, he said, that there was “no firm democratic majority.” But in 1991, he braved the tanks of August in the name of Russia’s lawful institutions. So how could he immediately provoke a political earthquake by demanding early legislative elections or a replacement for Russia’s Soviet-era constitution adopted in 1978, in Brezhnev’s heyday?

Yeltsin’s choice to live with a querulous body that became the citadel of his irreconcilable enemies seems admirable. “Of course, I have had many temptations,” he said in June. “For example, after sitting at the 9th Congress, to sign a decree on the abolition of the Congress, the Supreme Soviet and all the councils from top to bottom. There was such a temptation, and I had more than one sleepless night thinking about it. But then, that would not have been democracy.”

Two months later, during an appearance in the very Kremlin chamber once used by the Soviet legislature, Yeltsin was asked what he considered his greatest error during the past two years. He immediately replied that he should have proceeded right after the 1991 putsch to do away with the Congress and Supreme Soviet. Finally, on Sept. 21, he swallowed his democratic misgivings and simply ordered the Parliament dissolved, after Khasbulatov, with a flick of the index finger instantly comprehensible to Russians, intimated on television that the president was drunk. The standoff between the executive and legislative branches escalated into the Parliament-directed attack on Moscow’s Ostankino broadcast center and the storming of the White House.

By his own admission, Yeltsin miscalculated the danger to his policies posed by an assembly where most members were Communist-schooled factory and farm bosses or local potentates. But there is yet another error attributable to the president. When he chose to maintain Parliament, Yeltsin was bound by the logic of self-interest at the very least to seek some sort of modus vivendi with it. This he didn’t even try to do. Even friendly lawmakers were ignored.

“I write letters and notes to the president, but there is no feedback,” complains Ambartsumov, the foreign affairs committee chairman, who resigned last month.

It was virtually impossible, even for an important member of the Supreme Soviet, to penetrate Yeltsin’s inner sanctum. “And yet deputies are like house pets, they need care. They should be stroked gently, given food and water,” Ambartsumov says. Yeltsin never took the time to try to forge a working majority among the 247 Supreme Soviet members, never invited them to his country residence for a glass and a Russian-style chat “from the soul.” Their chairman, Khasbulatov, had risked his life at Yeltsin’s side in August, 1991. This month, he stuffed a bulletproof vest under his dress shirt and tried to marshal the Parliament against “former President Yeltsin.” But Khasbulatov, the legislator with bad teeth and a care-lined face, ended up inside Lefortovo prison with Rutskoi.

IN RETROSPECT, VICTORY for Russia’s demokraty and the man dubbed the “Lazarus of Soviet politics” happened too fast. “We could not imagine that we would come to power and would have to implement the reforms ourselves,” says Popov, one of the co-founders with Yeltsin of the pro-reform Interregional Group of Soviet lawmakers. “We thought it would be the Communists who would carry out the reforms and that our task would be limited to prodding them with all our strength and making them take more radical decisions. But it turned out that we acceded to power and were unprepared: We had no personnel, programs or plans for action.”

Given the rush of events, is it any wonder that the last two years turned into a succession of advances, retreats and confused wanderings? The job of leading the world’s largest country fell to the former construction engineer whose chief claim to political success was being victimized by an elite he once belonged to. “Yeltsin’s understanding is a tabula rasa,” says Vitaly T. Tretyakov, editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, one of Moscow’s most respected newspapers. “In economics, his knowledge is nil. Nil. In how to construct a state, zero. It’s really the same in all fields. It’s not his fault, of course. To come to power, he had to contest everything. But leading is a different matter.”

When the gunfire erupted in Moscow, President Clinton aligned himself “four-square” behind the burly Russian he bearhugged at their first summit in Vancouver this April. It’s difficult to imagine Clinton had any other choice, since lined up against the Russian reformer were neo-Soviet groups like the Communist-dominated National Salvation Front, xenophobic deputies, overt fascists and bands of armed malcontents. But the Yeltsin camp bears some of the responsibility for having polarized Russia to the point of bloodshed.

By blotting out the Parliament that has stymied him for 18 months and then banning Russia’s Constitutional Court proceedings until the country has a new constitution, Yeltsin has made his second political comeback. But what will he do with it? Yeltsin has proved to be two personae in one body, simultaneously the Stalin-era shock worker and Vanya the lazy Russian peasant, whiling away the winter sleeping on the stove. He manifested that schizophrenia after triumphing over the 1991 coup attempt, then vanishing for a holiday on the Black Sea.

This October’s battle with anti-reform forces also should be seen through the prism of Yeltsin’s uncanny ability to squander the fruits of his victories. After winning a 58% approval rating in a nationwide referendum in April, he ignored advice from Presidential Council members that he convene an emergency session of the Russian Congress and demand a new constitution, instead focusing his energy on a semiofficial “constitutional assembly.” In four months, according to one opinion poll, the boost given by the referendum to Yeltsin’s prestige had evaporated.

Sick of uncertainty and disorder, many Russians welcomed Yeltsin’s show of toughness this month, including the banning of some 50 extremist newspapers and those political groups that preach the gospel of “communo-fascism.” But that alone will not solve Russia’s problems, or the president’s. “Whether Yeltsin has won the Big War or not is still very much unclear,” says Vladimir N. Berezovsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Russian History. “It is wrong to think that because Parliament has been taken over and the deputies have been arrested, the war is over and there are no more problems. Resolution of those conflicts requires severe repressive measures, dictatorship and temporary autocracy. To be frank, this is common in politics, but it requires additional resources. And as far as we can see, Yeltsin is very likely to run out of resources pretty soon.”

After delays and mysterious wavering at the Russian Defense Ministry, some 1,300 soldiers came to the president’s aid in Moscow. But Yeltsin cannot storm all of the elected councils in Russia’s 89 increasingly powerful regions. He has demanded the that councils take “the honorable and courageous decision of self-dissolution” and ordered plans drawn up for the creation of new local legislatures, but conflict seems certain.

No longer required to adhere to the politically grandstanding and budget-busting laws passed by Russia’s legislators, the government wants to free energy prices (the omission Gaidar believes hamstrung economic reforms the first time around) and liberalize foreign trade and the price of bread, still government-controlled. Mikhail Berger, economics observer for the newspaper Izvestia, doesn’t expect any momentous actions until after the Dec. 12 elections for a new legislature. He also thinks the appalling experience of the past two years shows the president should not meddle in the economy. “Yeltsin does not have a clear-cut conception of what concrete steps should be taken,” Berger says candidly. “It might sound like a paradox, but the more the president is kept apart from direct economic actions, the more economic reform will be a success.”

Until the election of a new national legislature, Yeltsin has a good opportunity to apply what he has learned from earlier mistakes. One fact justifying prudence is that people behind some of the earlier debacles are back in the saddle again. Gaidar is economics minister and a first deputy premier. On the evening three weeks ago that anti-Yeltsin fighters rampaged through Moscow, it was Gennady Burbulis and Mikhail Poltoranin, two of the most divisive and controversial figures in Yeltsin’s entourage, who assumed command in the Kremlin, insiders say. “It was they who saved the situation. They took Yeltsin’s place,” Russian journalist Sergei Parkhomenko, who was there, wrote. Yeltsin, the correspondent recalls, seemed “paralyzed.”

Vowing to his fellow Russians that his rule will not turn into yet another dictatorship, Yeltsin has scheduled early presidential elections for June 12, a full two years before his five-year term expires. Whether he will even run is still unknown. Like the biblical Moses, Yeltsin may be fated to point the long-suffering Russian people toward a modern, democratic, market-oriented society but never reach it himself. But if his power play this October works, and he can bequeath to a new generation of leaders a stable system of representative government, that plus his role in the fall of Soviet Communism will make him one of the truly giant figures in the chronicles of his nation.

His former Politburo colleague Alexander N. Yakovlev, founder of the pro-presidential “Russian Choice” electoral bloc this year, admits that the Yeltsin Era, born in such hope and such great expectations, could soon end. “‘A revolution,” Yakovlev says, “always devours its own children.”