Russians Worried by Yeltsin Silence on Radicals’ Ballot Gains : Politics: The president is strangely--but characteristically--quiet. He is urged to speak out, reassure nation.

“How ‘bout those Ukrainians?”

When Boris N. Yeltsin met U.S. Vice President Al Gore this week, that was the essence of the Russian president’s first substantive comment. His people had just voted by the millions for an ultranationalist, the world was looking on in shock--and Yeltsin wanted to talk about Ukraine’s quibbling over giving up its nuclear arms.

Earlier, he had congratulated Russians on approving their new constitution in Sunday’s balloting--without mentioning that in the race among parties, right-wing extremist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky’s jingoism appeared to be far in the lead.

“It was empty, it was nothing,” Russian Television commentator Nikolai Svanidze said of Yeltsin’s declaration. “It amazes me that he didn’t show himself and calm the people, telling them that our country went through the war and it can’t accept fascism. We have too many painful memories.

“It’s a secret to me why he doesn’t speak,” Svanidze said.

Where are you, Boris Nikolayevich?

That lost lament has become the refrain of Russian politics, repeated at virtually every major crisis over the past three years. At times, Yeltsin has disappeared physically, as he did not long after the 1991 hard-line coup attempt, resurfacing nearly three weeks later.

At other times, like this one, he appears simply to need time to click in. His press service says that he will speak extensively on the election results soon, after they become official. And Gore reported that Yeltsin assured him that Russia’s reforms will remain on track.

Meanwhile, while Yeltsin has already reassured the American people through Gore, he has yet to reassure the Russians.

“Yeltsin can no longer keep silent,” wrote commentator Alexander Minkin in the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets. “The main thing is that the people want and have a right to know what the president thinks. Does he intend to come to agreement with the fascist fuehrer? If so, what about? The expansion of borders? The bombing of cities where Russians are oppressed? A useful and necessary war in the Caucasus, Ukraine, Central Asia?”

Part of the reason Yeltsin has not spoken out yet, analysts say, may be that he cannot tell the people what he thinks until he knows himself what that is.

“Yeltsin reacts slowly not because he lacks some abilities, but because he has no line--just no line,” said Vitaly Tretyakov, editor in chief of the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta. “Until now, there was one line: confrontation with everyone who was against the government’s course. . . . The election results show that this is a very dangerous line, including for the government itself.

“So,” Tretyakov continued, “he has to either reject it or continue it. If he continues it, he has to come out and say that despite everything, the people support reforms, and those who were deceived supported someone else, but we’ll continue in the same spirit.”

The voting breakdown, however, does not appear to allow Yeltsin to claim that his people support reforms--at least not as they are now being run, with rocketing prices, crime and corruption.

Latest unofficial figures show Zhirinovsky’s misnamed Liberal Democratic Party gaining at least 78 seats in the Duma, the powerful lower chamber of Parliament. The pro-reform Russia’s Choice movement appears likely to outpace him at 94 seats. But with Communists gaining 64 seats and largely conservative smaller parties the remainder of the 450 places, reformists remain badly outgunned.

And Yeltsin can no longer contend that Parliament is undemocratic because it was elected before the demise of communism.

One Yeltsin option is to temper his reforms and join forces with the more moderate of the Communists, said Boris Kurashvili of the Center for Political Studies of the prestigious Institute of State and Law.

Yeltsin and his allies have tended to talk about the “red-brown threat,” lumping together the red Communists and brown-shirted ultranationalists. Now, the time seems to have come to distinguish between the red and the brown, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander N. Shokhin said, and perhaps to work with the red.

Yeltsin thus may need to ally himself with the Communists he formerly saw as his main foes.

That would probably mean loosening the state purse strings for social programs and other concessions. “If he moves his policy to the left,” Kurashvili said, “it can be his salvation.”

On the other hand, Svanidze noted, heavy social spending would stall reforms even further, leaving the economy “hanging in the air” and perhaps delaying the reforms’ widespread payoff still further.

For now, however, all commentators want, judging by Minkin of Moskovsky Komsomolets, is for Yeltsin to tell them whether Russia is really headed toward fascism--and whether they should start stockpiling essential goods in preparation for worse times to come.