The World : Boris Yeltsin Acting More and More Like a Despot : Leadership: The president has created the impression that there is no alternative to him. In truth, there are many qualified to replace him.

The specter of despotism haunts Russian politics, a despotism born of incompetence.

Few would argue that much of the responsibility for the near total fail ure of Russian politics lies with Boris N. Yeltsin’s defeated adversaries. Blame for last month’s bloody confrontation must be shared by the Yeltsin government and by the president himself. For more than two years, Yeltsin has been Russia’s preeminent ruler, acknowledged as such by a majority of citizens. The time is right to take a closer look at his leadership and the myths that have grown up around it.

Myth No. 1: The only way Yeltsin could solve the country’s problems was to disband the Supreme Soviet.

While it has some basis in reality, this myth cloaks a sobering truth: Yeltsin is incapable of functioning in a democratic context. The Parliament he dissolved was the same body that elected him speaker in 1991; amended the constitution to include a respectable bill of rights; founded the office of a popularly elected president, and, following the failed coup of August, 1991, granted Yeltsin the power to govern by decree. This political honeymoon went sour because Yeltsin has never been able to transcend his limitations as a communist-style politician--a tough and abrasive secretary of a regional party committee. In short, a regional Soviet despot.

Yeltsin construed the early cooperation of the disbanded Parliament as its acknowledgment of his right to rule unchallenged because his political experience was shaped by the communist script--a servile Soviet legislature bowing and scraping before the party’s first secretary.

Myth No. 2: The upcoming elections for the new Parliament and the referendum on the new constitution will solve the legitimacy crisis.

This is, at best, a partial truth. With the election commission run by Yeltsin appointees free of any independent oversight, and with the television spewing out unabashedly pro-Yeltsin propaganda, the stature of the first post-communist Parliament is bound to be diminished.

The long-awaited--for some 200 years!--democratic constitution, though, in some respects, an improvement of the earlier draft, remains flawed. The constitutional lines separating regional and federal authority are blurred, with many governmental functions assigned to “joint jurisdiction.” The future Parliament cannot promulgate budget-related legislation “without the government’s prior approval.” And the principle of checks and balances is severely undermined: Government ministers are allowed to be elected to the Parliament’s lower house, while presidentially appointed regional governors can run for its upper chamber.

Rather than strengthening the presidency, these provisions, ultimately blurring the lines of authority, will only encourage confusion and arbitrary rule.

Myth No. 3: There is no one but Yeltsin, and without him, the country and, with it the world, would go to the dogs.

Without detracting from Yeltsin’s stature, his courage and his charisma that has inspired trust in the majority of the Russian people and has held them together at a time of growing hardships and political crisis, a second Yeltsin presidency would be a dangerous proposition. By encouraging political polarization, Yeltsin has successfully created, especially in Western eyes, the impression of the absence of an alternative to himself.

Yet, the Russian public seems to understand both Yeltsin’s merits and failings. A recent survey, commissioned by U.S. News & World Report, showed that half of those polled supported Yeltsin in his standoff with the Supreme Soviet, but 61% considered another Yeltsin term as undesirable. There is hope, then, among voters that a worthy replacement to Yeltsin may soon be found.

Such potential leaders exist, though they are overshadowed by Yeltsin because he prefers to have them inside his government as deputy prime ministers rather than outside gathering votes. Indeed, the array of Yeltsin’s former and current deputy prime ministers looks like a who’s who in the next presidential race. When the campaign started, these stars of Yeltsin’s government quickly expressed their willingness to shift to the legislative branch, ostensibly to make the new Parliament safer for democracy.

It was to stem this hemorrhaging and to ensure their loyalty to the president that the separation-of-powers provision, prominent in the earlier draft of the constitution, was removed in the final draft. Similarly, among the key reasons why Yeltsin reneged on his solemn promise of an early presidential election was the fear that, in the absence of strong parties, his government would simply disintegrate as his lieutenants metamorphosed into presidential candidates. Yet, rather than encourage party-building, Yeltsin, as he told a group of newspaper editors, will spend the rest of his term “finding and grooming” his successor.

There are plenty of candidates. On the more conservative end of the spectrum are Yurii Skokov, former head of the Security Council, and Oleg Lobov, its current head. On the more liberal side are the deputy prime ministers--Sergei M. Shakhrai, Vladimir F. Shumeiko, Yegor T. Gaidar, Anatoly B. Chubais--and the prime minister, Viktor S. Chernomyrdin. It should come as no surprise that Gaidar, Shakhrai, Shumeiko and Chubais, all except Shumeiko under age 40, appeared at the top of the list of candidates for Parliament from the Democratic Bloc and now are busy campaigning for a seat in the state Duma.

One of most promising is Yeltsin’s chief legal brain and authority on provincial politics, Shakhrai. His Party of Russian Unity and Accord (provincial), which he founded, collected more signatures than any other electoral bloc fielding candidates in the coming election, including Yeltsin’s Russia’s Choice. A Cossack, Shakhrai, 37, is actually a conservative federalist. His program would harmonize relations among regions and stabilize the revolutionary reforms of Yeltsin by stressing the values of “family, property, labor and country.”

In early October, Interfax News Agency floated a report about Shakhrai’s dissatisfaction with “democratization at breakneck speed.” A few days ago, he gave an interview to Moscow’s Independent Newspaper, Yeltsin’s most exacting critic. Among other things, he said that the final draft of the constitution was top-heavy and did not grant enough autonomy to the regions. This and similar statements made by Shakhrai as the parliamentary election approaches have the ring of sound bites fired by a politician running for an elective office, not one of the president’s chief aides. Indeed, a week ago, he took temporary leave, along with Gaidar, from government to devote himself more fully to the campaign.

Shakhrai is a man to watch as he moves into the forefront of his country’s new presidential and, most important, civilized party politics. A man who can build a real political party in post-communist Russia will work steadily with allies and opponents, rather than stagger and lurch, however nobly and good-naturedly, from one “last and decisive battle” to another. God knows, the Russians have had enough of that.