Yeltsin’s Test : A NEW PARLIAMENT MAY END UP CHALLENGING HIS COMMITMENT TO DEMOCRACY.

These days, the Moscow press often refers to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin as “Czar Boris.” This is meant to refer, in part, to his increasing high-handedness; it also alludes to Boris Godunov, a dark czar of the early 17th Century.

Godunov had no legitimate claim to the throne. Although he is generally considered to have been concerned about his people’s welfare, rumors persist that Godunov ordered the true heir murdered, and his early death, as starving rebels stormed Moscow, brought on a period known in Russian as the smuta , or Time of Troubles. During this anarchic outburst, perhaps as many as a third of Russians perished from disease, foreign invasion and fratricidal conflict.

The parallel with Yeltsin is of more than passing interest. Russians often refer to the post-Soviet chaos as another smuta , and although Yeltsin is generally credited for furthering the cause of democratic reform, his violent victory over the hard-line Parliament in October and his revocation of the old Soviet-era constitution raise doubts about both his commitment to the rule of law and his own political legitimacy--even among those who regard his actions as having been forced by his enemies.

Furthermore, the economic, social, political and ethnic tensions in Russia and in the post-Soviet successor states run deep and could easily erupt in wide-scale violence should politics take a wrong turn. They were certainly not settled by Yeltsin’s military victory. Yeltsin clearly hopes that the elections today in Russia will give his supporters a working majority in the new Parliament and that voters will ratify his draft constitution. Thus armed, he aims to tackle the problems besetting Russia.

One hopes, for Russia’s sake, that the elections will produce a government able to address Russia’s problems peacefully. But today’s voting may not provide the mandate for radical reform that Yeltsin desires. Instead, the elections may produce an executive-legislative confrontation every bit as dangerous as the one ended by force in October, a conflict fueled by nationalism, economic disarray and the imperial collapse.

When lines of legitimacy are unclear, the foremost concern must be who controls the army. On the surface, the successful assault on the Russian White House at Yeltsin’s command would seem to suggest that the army remains loyal to him. As more becomes known of the October events, however, it becomes ever clearer that the army was, as a body, less than enthusiastic about coming to Yeltsin’s defense.

Soldiers have reason to be discontent with the current government. Under the Soviet system, military officers were an elite, given better housing and goods than Soviet society at large. They received the best equipment the country could produce and had a clear mission: opposition to the United States and the rest of the capitalist world.

This has all evaporated. Tens of thousands of officers withdrawn from the former East European empire languish in hovels, on waiting lists for as yet unbuilt apartments. Inflation has wiped out the value of soldiers’ wages, and the vast industrial infrastructure that formerly forged Soviet military might lies rusting, with hundreds of thousands of workers left unemployed in all but name.

The economic disarray of the military would be bad enough; even worse is the wounding of officers’ professional and national pride. The military, once touted as the defenders of Soviet power and honor, now feel themselves to be despised. Draft evasion is epidemic, and former outposts of Soviet imperial glory have been seized by peoples once subject to Russian power.

Many officers, left stranded at the margins of Russia, receiving little from the new Russian state and thus feeling no debt to Yeltsin, have taken up a new cause: the fate of the 25 million ethnic Russians in the “near abroad,” that is, the non-Russian successor states. Although the facts remain unclear, Russian officers in Moldova, the Caucasus and Central Asia seem to be acting independently of Moscow, and sometimes even against Yeltsin’s express will. They have become involved in ethnic conflicts in regions as far apart as Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and Tadzhikistan. Many Russian officers talk openly of recreating the old Soviet Union under Russian nationalist auspices. To this end, they have supplied forces rebelling against the non-Russian leaderships of the newly independent states.

So far, this kind of activity has been of limited importance; attention has been focused instead on the power struggle in Moscow. Once the new Parliament is elected, however, civil control of the army could become a flash point. If Yeltsin’s newly established party, Russia’s Choice, led by Yegor T. Gaidar, emerges victorious, this issue might be postponed. If, however, one of the many other contending parties wins, it is almost certain to become a central issue.

Many of the other parties hold that Yeltsin has sold out the interests of Russians abroad. These are central tenets of the reconstituted communist and the nationalist agrarian parties. According to polls, neither of these parties should gain a majority, but polling in Russia is notoriously unreliable.

Should nationalists do well, this would pressure other parties to take up the nationalist banner. Then, should a military crisis arise on Russia’s periphery--as it almost certainly will--especially one involving expatriate Russians, this would almost certainly provoke a conflict between president and Parliament.

On the economic front, there is little reason to believe that the elections will quickly defuse Russia’s problems. Every party other than Russia’s Choice advocates a slower pace of economic reform; even the group led by Grigory Yavlinsky, the author of the “500 Days Plan” devised under Mikhail S. Gorbachev to introduce a market economy, now believes that Yeltsin and Gaidar have moved too quickly. Yavlinsky enjoys great personal popularity, and his unnamed party may do quite well. Another party, the Civic Union, argues the same case even more stridently. Its leadership is composed of industrial managers, many of whom run dying military super-factories.

Should such slow- and anti-reformers gain a majority, Yeltsin would be in trouble, and the economy could be thrown into confusion once again. His economic program is finally producing positive results now that the old Parliament can no longer sabotage his programs; although inflation remains high at just under 20% a month, this is lower than in the recent past, and Russians’ incomes, in real terms, have begun to rise. Private economic activity is growing and finally spawning well-paying jobs.

Nonetheless, there is a great deal of pain in the current situation, especially for those workers mired in moribund military-industrial steel towns. Such cities dot the Russian landscape, thanks to the Soviet method of concentrating military factories in closed, remote areas. With military spending, in real terms, falling 78% since the Soviet Union’s collapse, such cities find themselves with virtually no viable economic activity. The government keeps these old arms and steel factories open only by printing money for wages, thus at the same time taxing the more productive sectors of the economy and fueling inflation.

The problem of dealing with these dinosaurs was one of the central disputes between Yeltsin and the old Parliament. There is no reason to believe that the issue will be any less explosive after new elections. Should any party other than Russia’s Choice--or any coalition of parties--win a majority, they will certainly push for continued subsidies for obsolete factories to prevent unemployment.

The flawed logic behind such a go-slow approach is clear: It merely postpones the pain of unemployment and, at the same time, punishes those elements of the economy that are finally producing wealth. Whatever the logic, the politics are another question entirely. The 5 million Russian workers who are presently employed in unproductive jobs may be a drain on the economy, but they can now vote. They are unlikely to accept the economists’ well-reasoned arguments.

Political moderation and tolerance will be needed; unfortunately, these qualities are rare in Russian political history. Should compromise fail, a modern smuta in a nuclear-armed Russia could be even deadlier than the original.