NEWS ANALYSIS : Yeltsin Takes Gamble With Crackdown in Caucasus : Russia: President’s former allies are now among his harshest critics. They brand him a Kremlin hard-liner.

With his decision to storm the rebel Chechen capital of Grozny, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin’s transformation from populist reformer to Kremlin hard-liner is complete, the Russian president’s many critics say.

“Yeltsin is at the point of no return,” political analyst Alexei G. Arbatov said. “He has decided to go all out. He thinks he needs no allies because the army and police are on his side. He spits on the democrats’ love.”

As bombs fell on a Grozny orphanage, making a mockery of Yeltsin’s promise to halt the bombing of civilian targets, democrats who once embraced the former Sverdlovsk Communist Party boss as the symbol of Russian reform said they can no longer support the Russian president.

“I have the feeling that we and the president are living in two separate information fields,” said liberal economist Yegor T. Gaidar, referring to the growing and sometimes absurd divide between Russian government statements about the conflict in Chechnya and the footage that Russian citizens see on television.

“I think he has made a fatal mistake,” Gaidar said.

Yeltsin jettisoned Gaidar in January after the liberal economist, the first architect of Russia’s free-market reforms, led the only party that campaigned under Yeltsin’s banner to a humiliating defeat in last year’s parliamentary elections. But Gaidar stayed loyal to Yeltsin, even when the president stopped returning his telephone calls once Gaidar spoke out against the intervention in Chechnya.

In the last two days, Gaidar, former Finance Minister Boris G. Fyodorov and human rights activist Yelena G. Bonner, the widow of Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident Andrei D. Sakharov, have all broken publicly with the president over Chechnya.

“A democratic country cannot keep by armed force an ethnic group that does not want to remain in it,” Bonner wrote in a letter to Yeltsin. Claiming that Russia was turning back to totalitarianism, she resigned from the president’s human rights commission.

The liberal Fyodorov had initially supported the crackdown, arguing that multinational Russia must defend its territorial integrity or risk becoming an ethnic Humpty Dumpty.

But on Thursday, he blasted the government for causing needless bloodshed through gross military incompetence.

Fyodorov and Gaidar said the war in Chechnya threatened to bust the Russian budget, send inflation skyrocketing and shackle this new democracy’s fragile political freedoms.

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Gaidar said he will not seek Yeltsin’s impeachment, as some have demanded, but hinted that the democrats will be looking for an alternative to Yeltsin in presidential elections scheduled 18 months from now.

“You must pay for your mistakes if you are president,” he said.

In recent weeks, Yeltsin has lost the support of not only the democrats but also most of Russia’s intellectuals, journalists, members of Parliament and many of his own senior advisers.

One Russian newspaper on Thursday dubbed the president “Bombeltsin.”

Far more damaging, at least five army generals have publicly criticized the Russian attack on the tiny Muslim republic.

“What is the purpose of killing people?” Lt. Gen. Alexander I. Lebed, commander of the Russian 14th Army in Tiraspol, Moldova, asked in an interview with the news agency Interfax. “Are there no other ways to resolve the problem? Or would Moscow lose too much merely by talking to (Chechen President Dzhokar M.) Dudayev?”

“The blitzkrieg has failed,” said Deputy Defense Minister Boris V. Gromov, who faces possible dismissal for criticizing the intervention, which he warns could split the armed forces and lead to civil war.

Analysts saw the renewed bombardment of Grozny as a watershed for Yeltsin, who has now thrown in his lot with the most hawkish of his Kremlin advisers and staked his political future on a quick victory in Chechnya.

“He was a populist from the very beginning, not a democrat,” Caucasus scholar Sergei A. Arutiunov said. “He is turning into a puppet of the hard-line generals surrounding him.”

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Among those who appear to have Yeltsin’s trust are the powerful Security Council Secretary Oleg I. Lobov, Nationalities Minister Nikolai D. Yegorov and the mysterious head of Yeltsin’s security service, Maj. Gen. Alexander V. Korzhakov.

Although Yeltsin met with Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin to discuss how to restore Chechnya’s economy, Chernomyrdin seems distanced from his boss of late.

Kremlinologists--who are making a comeback as the decision-making process inside the red brick fortress becomes ever more opaque--whisper that Korzhakov has been especially influential on Chechnya policy. Yeltsin once described himself as “inseparable” from Korzhakov, who was the KGB bodyguard assigned to Yeltsin when he joined the Politburo.

The shadowy Korzhakov’s powers have come under intense scrutiny since the leaking of an eyebrow-raising letter in which Korzhakov instructed Chernomyrdin to review agreements made with the World Bank.

“Who is running the country--Yeltsin, Chernomyrdin or Gen. Korzhakov?” a recent headline in the newspaper Izvestia asked.

Though the hawks clearly have the president’s ear, they may be saying exactly what Yeltsin wants to hear.

Some analysts argue that Yeltsin is merely continuing the political metamorphosis he began one year ago, when ultranationalist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky and the Communists trounced Gaidar and other democrats in elections to Russia’s first post-Communist Parliament.

Liberals who clung to the comforting thought that the 1993 election results were a fluke have been disabused of the notion this year, when nationalists and Communists triumphed in local by-elections across Russia.

Ever the shrewd politician, Yeltsin began redefining himself as the authoritarian “strong hand” that poll after poll say some Russians long for.

Less than two years ago, when Zhirinovsky was generally dismissed as an extremist crank, the tireless orator stood up on a platform in Gorky Park and promised his sparse but zealous crowd that Russia would soon regain its former Caucasian and Black Sea possessions, along with its battered prestige.

Now Zhirinovsky is one of the few lawmakers who support Yeltsin’s Chechnya policy, along with such “national patriots” as Sergei N. Baburin and Alexander G. Nevzorov, and a coalition of conservative regional officials headed by former Soviet Politburo member Alexander S. Dzasokhov.

“In fact, Yeltsin has already embraced Zhirinovsky’s line,” Arutiunov said. “What he is doing in Chechnya is exactly what Zhirinovsky would do. So it has happened already.”

Over the last year, Yeltsin has also adopted a more stridently nationalist tone on such questions as Bosnia-Herzegovina, NATO membership for Eastern Europe and an early lifting of the trade embargo against the former Soviet Union’s best client, Iraq.

This week, the Russian Foreign Ministry once again said Moscow wants changes in the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, which limits the number of troops it can station in “flank” areas such as Chechnya.

Arguing that the Soviet-era treaty is discriminatory toward Russia in light of its post-Soviet borders, spokesman Grigory B. Karasin complained that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has dragged its feet on agreeing to allow more Russian troops to be stationed in the Caucasus.

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Karasin hinted that Russia might have to take unspecified measures to protect its national interests if the treaty is not revised soon.

Turkey is lobbying NATO against allowing Russia to move more troops southward, concerned that Russia is steadily re-creating its Soviet-era military presence in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan.

The bloodier Yeltsin’s crackdown on Chechnya, the less likely is the West to accommodate Russian demands on such sensitive issues as troop limits and the expansion of NATO.

With polls showing that 75% of Russians no longer support him, Yeltsin is clearly gambling that a quick victory in Chechnya will revive his authority and his popularity.

The danger is that the Chechen war will cost more money and political goodwill than Yeltsin expects. Most wars do. Russia’s first freely elected president could wind up jeopardizing both economic progress and the support of the West. That could hurt even a Kremlin hard-liner.