Regional Outlook : Crimea’s President a Prisoner of His Own Separatist Revolt : Russia has lost interest in supporting Yuri Meshkov and his would-be ministate.

Yuri A. Meshkov, the pro-Russian separatist president of Crimea, gazes down from a prison window at the few dozen supporters standing vigil outside. He has plenty of idle time to ponder what went wrong.

The prison is his own sixth-floor presidential suite in Crimea’s gleaming white Parliament building. He has secluded himself here since March 17, when Ukraine’s central government in Kiev took away his job, three official cars, seven phone lines and 15 bodyguards.

An athletic, 49-year-old lawyer with a droopy brown mustache and silver mop of hair, he awakens each morning on an office couch and puts on a suit to look presidential for visitors. His wife and teen-age son, fearing for their lives, have fled to Moscow, but a recent bomb threat did not budge Meshkov from the building; if he left, they might lock him out.

Besides, what would he do out there? “I could go to the towns, the villages, but I would have to speak with certainty,” he said in an interview, sounding puzzled by events that have left him powerless. “I could not tell people that everything is really decided in Moscow and Kiev.”

Meshkov’s demise is a tale about the pitfalls of leading a would-be ministate from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Elected in a landslide 16 months ago on a promise of independence and closer Crimean ties to Moscow, he presided instead over the collapse of what limited autonomy from Kiev the Crimean peninsula already had.

One reason this happened is a new geopolitical reality: As Russia fought to crush secessionists on its own soil in Chechnya, its leaders backed away from pro-Moscow separatists they had abetted in neighboring republics right after the Soviet breakup of 1991.

But just as frustrating for Crimea’s separatists was a struggle for power and property that erupted among themselves, fed criminal gang warfare and wrecked their cause. While such post-Soviet battles plague most of the new republics, the tentative architecture of Crimean statehood was simply overwhelmed, leaving a frightened and impoverished people clamoring for order under any flag.

A Vermont-size peninsula jutting off the Ukrainian mainland into the Black Sea, Crimea is a coveted paradise. Catherine the Great called it the finest pearl in her crown. The Soviet elite vacationed in seaside palaces and health spas, behind mountains that block the chilling winds from the north and give the coast a pine-scented, Mediterranean climate.

But Crimea today is full of the kind of trouble vacationers like to escape. Ukraine’s Interior minister calls it “a gathering place for international criminals.” A war among four home-grown crime groups left 57 people dead in a recent four-month stretch. “There was a period when every day something blew up,” recalls a Simferopol State University professor.

The turmoil goes back centuries, but was spurred in 1954 when Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine as a token of Slavic solidarity. The gift mattered little to ethnic Russians--two-thirds of Crimea’s 2.7 million people--until the Soviet Union collapsed, isolating them in an independent Ukraine.

A Crimean war involving the two strongest armies of the former Soviet Union, as well as the Russian-led, Crimean-based Black Sea Fleet, has loomed as a possible since Alexander V. Rutskoi, then Russia’s vice president, visited the peninsula in April, 1992, and called for its secession.

But so far, ethnic peace holds in Crimea. The drive for separatism is economic: As Ukraine’s economy stagnated and Russia’s began to reform, people here felt left behind and voted their pocketbook.

Meshkov, a populist from a party called Russia, won office in January, 1994, with 73% of the vote. Two months later his party won a majority in Parliament, and 78% of the voters called for a treaty putting Crimea and Ukraine on an equal footing.

Largely ignored at first by Kiev and Moscow, the winners started fighting among themselves.

“They looked at all those wonderful resorts, built for Communist general secretaries, and figured that whoever controls them will be the real master of Crimea,” said Valery Lavrov of the Crimean Research Center of Humanities.

Yevgeny Saburov, a prominent Moscow economist brought in by Meshkov, boosted revenues with tax and currency-exchange reforms, easing dependence on subsidies from Kiev. But when he drew up a plan to sell off most state property within two years, the new Parliament blocked it.

Meshkov, himself beholden to wealthy campaign contributors, fought back by taking control of Crimea’s 16,000-member police force and declaring war on corruption. The main result was that throughout last summer, the police were split into two forces--one loyal to Meshkov, one to Kiev’s Interior Ministry.

By the time it was abolished, Meshkov’s police force was broke and reportedly had turned to a crime gang for funding.

One contributor was Yevgeny Podanev, an ethnic Russian businessman with casino gambling interests and mob connections. According to a Simferopol newspaper, Podanev persuaded Meshkov’s administration to rent him a bay so he could build a yacht club at Balaklava.

Last May, Podanev walked into the funeral dinner for the slain leader of a gang that opposed him and was shot dead. Forty days later, Mikhail Korchelava, a Podanev associate and chairman of Meshkov’s Economic Council, was slain in a bar.

A bloodless but more open struggle shattered the palm- and evergreen-shaded tranquillity of Nizhnaya Oreanda, a 68-acre seaside resort near Yalta where Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev went for massages and saltwater baths.

After nine raids by Meshkov’s police and several death threats, the spa’s Soviet-era director was forced to turn the place over to a Meshkov supporter. A month later he was reinstated by Parliament.

The turbulence gave Ukrainian President Leonid D. Kuchma an opening to restore rule from Kiev. He acted in September, when Meshkov and Parliament were locked in a comic-opera duel to abolish each other’s powers.

Elected last summer with huge support from Crimea after promising closer ties to Russia, Kuchma was mistakenly viewed here as an ally. Both sides appealed to him and accepted his compromise--the appointment of Anatoly Franchuk as Crimea’s prime minister.

But Franchuk, whose daughter is married to Kuchma’s son, moved quickly to subordinate law enforcement, taxation, budget, trade and privatization matters to the Kuchma administration. The crackdown culminated in March as Crimean leaders plotted to oust Franchuk; Kiev struck first, abolishing Meshkov’s office and Crimea’s separatist constitution.

Ukrainian officials argue that, with centrally decreed economic reform finally starting under Kuchma, Crimea doesn’t need autonomy to move ahead. But they admit that reforms must pay off here to keep the separatist movement down.

For now, most Meshkov voters are disillusioned and some are willing to accept Kiev’s authority. In a recent poll of Crimeans, more than half said they would cross out all candidates or simply not vote if the elections were rerun. Meshkov scored a 10% approval rating in the poll.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin agreed last year to respect Ukraine’s borders in return for Kiev’s consent to give up nuclear weapons, and he has refused to receive Meshkov. As Russia pursues a broader friendship treaty with Ukraine, Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin has said that “no one in Russia will fight for Crimea.”

Similar reappraisals have isolated separatists in Moldova’s Trans-Dniester region and Georgia’s Abkhazia province, which set up governments in 1992 and 1993 with the Russian army’s help. Now eager to shore up ties with neighboring countries, Moscow refuses to recognize their breakaway regions as independent.

“The time for self-proclaimed ministates is running out,” declares Irina Selivanova of Moscow’s Institute of International Economic and Political Research.

Looking out his window, the first--and perhaps last--president of Crimea ponders that assessment. On the wall is a reminder of Meshkov’s only enduring act of separatism, one that cost nothing and offended few: He put Crimean clocks on Moscow time, an hour ahead of the rest of Ukraine.

“It must be easier to be president of a large country with all the attributes of power,” he said. “It is extremely hard to lead a small autonomy with shapeless institutions. We are in a transition period, there is no stability, and sometimes it is impossible to foresee what is coming.”