Fearing Tyranny, Russia Intellectuals Give Yeltsin a Piece of Their Mind : Politics: Former dissidents who agree on nothing else co-sign article critical of president. Faith in democratic politics wanes.

As the defendant in one of the most notorious dissident trials of the Soviet era, Andrei Sinyavsky has long had a special stature among Russian intellectuals. So when he co-wrote a recent article in one of Moscow’s most prominent liberal newspapers with two other former dissidents with whom he had earlier traded charges and countercharges of KGB collaboration, it was a significant moment.

“Long-term opponents, enemies for years, today we sit behind the same table,” the article read. “Not because we have forgiven each other, but because in the life of every man there are values which he holds dearer than himself. These are his Motherland and Freedom. Today they are in danger.”

The common enemy now, they wrote, is Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin.

By most measures, Yeltsin is riding high. His overall popularity remains tops among domestic politicians, his political opposition in the disbanded Parliament is discredited and elections next month bid fair to produce a new Parliament more to his taste than the last.

Yet among political and intellectual leaders there is perhaps more doubt today than at any time in the last two years that democratic politics, in general, and Yeltsin, in particular, are serving Russia well.

This change has become more pronounced as this country prepares to vote Dec. 12 on a new constitution and for a new Parliament--the first lawmaking body to be democratically elected since the collapse of the Soviet state in 1991.

How the shift in intellectual mood might affect the elections is impossible to predict. But it does reflect a real disillusionment among the public at large with democratic politics.

“There is a non-faith in democracy, or a realization that democracy doesn’t exist here,” Len V. Karpinsky, editor in chief of Moscow News, a leading liberal weekly newspaper, said in an interview.

Yeltsin himself seems to feel he needs to keep the creative intelligentsia on his side; as the pre-election season of government blandishments opened last week, among the first groups to receive handouts were creative artists.

The government announced Friday that it will award 500 monthly stipends of about $1,000 to “outstanding artists” and stipends of $500 monthly to 500 selected “youthful talents.” Yeltsin made some artistic endeavors tax-exempt and “recommended” that artists unions be relieved of the need to pay rent on their quarters.

Disaffection with Yeltsin among the Russian political intelligentsia is not entirely new; over the last two years, the president’s inability to reach a lasting consensus with the legislative branch--or even to effectively co-opt its members--has disquieted many political observers.

“Yeltsin has committed even more mistakes than his opponents could wish him to,” Yuri Afanasiev, a historian and former politician, said in an interview in September.

But it has appreciably sharpened since Oct. 4, when the president responded to armed right-wing attacks on government buildings by calling out the army to shell the Parliament building, or White House. The goal was to force right-wing legislators to abandon their refuge in the building.

This succeeded, but at the cost of the public spectacle of tanks bombarding a symbol of democracy for five hours on a Monday morning. Authorities have said that at least 146 people were killed over the two days of right-wing assaults and the army’s counterattack.

There are signs that many Russians view the shelling as such a humiliating display that no one associated with it, including the president, can escape its consequences.

“To me it was traumatic, even though I’m on the side of the president politically,” said Fyodor M. Burlatsky, a historian and former editor of the Literary Gazette. “It shows that a totalitarian consciousness has permeated our society. People are now accustomed to the idea of firing cannons at the Parliament.”

Yeltsin followed up the shelling of the White House with anti-opposition measures reminiscent to many of Bolshevik authoritarianism. He suspended a raft of Communist and nationalist political parties; he suspended and then banned several opposition newspapers; he even for a day reimposed censorship on the press. This appalled many former supporters among the intelligentsia.

“Today I’m prepared to compromise with my enemy,” Sinyavsky wrote Oct. 13 in the liberal Nezavisimaya Gazeta, “for my beloved free speech is in danger.” He added: “The art of government includes a skill at compromise, a talent for cooperation. In the given case, a victory by either side means defeat for democracy.”

Remarked Alexander Lyubimov, a leading television journalist who was pulled off the air this month after he advised his viewers to ignore government calls Oct. 3 for street opposition to parliamentary forces, “Now we’re seeing the reverse revival of Communist traditions.”

To be sure, Russian intellectuals are far from unanimous in their disillusionment with Yeltsin’s actions; many intellectuals express their distaste for the president by attacking other intellectuals who remain on his side. Thus, days after the shelling of the White House, a group of 42 leading artists, including poets Bella Akhmadulina and Robert Rozhdestvensky, called on Yeltsin in an open letter to ban all Communist and nationalist groups, outlaw their newspapers and put their leaders on trial.

“These dull scoundrels respect only force,” they wrote.

The letter elicited an instant reply in print from Viktor Rozov, a leading playwright and film scenarist, who called the authors “spiteful, vengeful and cowardly” and warned Yeltsin that their proposals would “set you on the road to ruthless dictatorship.”

Similarly, Sinyavsky complained in his Nezavisimaya Gazeta article that “my old enemies have begun to speak the truth, and my native tribe of Russian intellectuals, instead of constituting an opposition to Yeltsin, again welcome the undertakings of a chieftain and appeal for harsh measures.”

For all that, criticism of the president is rising markedly in the press, including newspapers that earlier were considered resolutely pro-Yeltsin.

Izvestia, in its sternest assault on Yeltsin to date, editorialized last week that the president’s decision not to hold early presidential elections in June, and his tendency toward constraining the opposition, might discourage many voters from turning out at all.

Scarcely a week passes in which the Nezavisimaya Gazeta does not publish at least one front-page cartoon ridiculing the leader. One this month, for example, showed a groggy Yeltsin rising from bed in his undershirt, scratching his armpit and extending his arm involuntarily in a stiff Hitlerian salute. Another, shortly after the shelling of the White House, showed him standing on the edge of a precipice, shouting, “Quiet!” at the cliff crumbling beneath his feet.

Yeltsin’s decline in moral authority makes it easier for many to criticize his record.

“The average standard of living, by the most modest accounting, has fallen by 20 times,” Sinyavsky said. “An overwhelming part of the population is thrown back on wartime rations, and against the backdrop of such mass impoverishment is the creation of fortunes by all kinds of mafiosi in the colossal black market.”

But the common basis of disappointment with Yeltsin is doubt about the integrity of the December elections.

“Without openness, the forthcoming elections will be a rebirth of the Stalinist-Brezhnevian ‘choice without choices,’ ” former dissident Peter Egides, one of Sinyavsky’s co-authors, wrote in the Nezavisimaya Gazeta. “That is, it will be the funeral of democracy.”

Sergei Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.