Yeltsin’s Backers Brush Off Reports of Bad Health

Yelena Levina, a physician, has never examined President Boris N. Yeltsin.

But don’t worry, she says, he’s not ill.

“It’s a tactical political move,” she said, trying to explain Yeltsin’s unsettling election day seclusion. “He changed his tactics because people are sick and tired of seeing politicians on television.”

Pausing outside a Moscow voting station, the 42-year-old surgeon thought awhile, then admitted to being worried that her diagnosis might be wrong.

“I’m not a religious person, but I pray for him to live long,” she said. “What if he dies? I don’t even want to think about it.”

Along with millions of others, Levina cast a ballot Wednesday for Yeltsin’s reelection not knowing the state of his health but saying this is not what really matters.

In a momentous choice about the kind of society they want, many Russians said they were rejecting a return to communism as much as voting for a 65-year-old reformer who has a history of heart trouble, has not appeared in public in more than a week and may be unfit to finish a new, four-year term.

Most voters interviewed leaving the polls said they believe the official line that Russia’s first freely elected ruler was simply tired from the 4 1/2-month campaign and had nothing more serious than laryngitis.

And many who doubted that story said they were willing to believe that Yeltsin’s 1993 constitution could outlive its author and somehow guide the country through a peaceful, democratic succession to a new leader.

“We’re voting not for a man but for a particular destiny,” said Larisa Yegorova, 50, a dentist. “If he cannot be with us, someone else will be found, maybe someone better. There are others.”

Alexander Karasyov, a 36-year-old engineer-turned-businessman, was more blunt: “Yeltsin hasn’t looked too good lately, but so what? I’d rather elect the devil than the Communists. Everything would be wrecked if they return.”

Yeltsin rose from his sickbed in December to plot an energetic campaign that took him to 24 of Russia’s 89 regions.

He plunged into crowds, answered hostile, in-your-face questions, danced onstage with rock bands and worked 20-hour days.

He not only out-hustled Communist Party challenger Gennady A. Zyuganov, who led in early voter surveys, but he made a strong case that a continuation of painful free-market reforms would be better than a return to Soviet stagnation.

Yeltsin’s apparent relapse has evoked another memory of earlier times.

“It reminds me of the Brezhnev era,” Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet ruler who handed over the Kremlin to Yeltsin in 1991, commented after marking his ballot Wednesday against both candidates.

Leonid I. Brezhnev was the first of three Soviet rulers who were kept out of sight for weeks at a time and died in quick succession in the 1980s.

As in those days, Kremlin doctors have released precious little information about the heart ailments that kept Yeltsin bedridden for four months last year.

Perhaps because they are used to seeing Yeltsin bounce back, voters were less than alarmed when he failed to cast his ballot, as he always does, in Moscow. A private polling place was set up for him near his country dacha.

“If I had a dacha where I could vote, I’d stay in too,” said Alexander Cheganov, 72.

Said Yelena Vilova, a 40-year-old engineer: “He’s just resting after all that dancing.”

The general ignorance of Yeltsin’s condition reflects, in part, a successful government campaign to play down the news about it, especially on television--the source of most Russians’ information about politics.

Zyuganov held daily news conferences in the final week of the campaign to draw attention to what he called Yeltsin’s “alarming” disappearance. He pushed for an examination of the president by an independent team of doctors.

But his message was blunted by censorship. Neither of Russia’s two nationwide networks, both controlled by the government, carried his words.

Russia’s electorate is so polarized, however, that the impact of Zyuganov’s message would have been limited anyway.

Many of those who voted Communist said they did so not because Yeltsin is ailing physically but because, as computer technician Oleg Dunich put it, “he’s sick in the head. . . . He has lost touch with reality, with an understanding of people’s needs.”

One Yeltsin voter noted that Franklin D. Roosevelt governed the United States for years with a disabling illness. Others said that the longer Yeltsin can stay in power the better, no matter how ill.

“If he can just maintain the current course for another year or so, the country will be in a lot better condition by the time we need to have another election,” said Ivan Irmizov, a 41-year-old artist.

According to the constitution, the president would be replaced by the prime minister in case of death or incapacity, and a new election would be called within three months. In that event, Yeltsin voters said the country would be in the hands of a solid caretaker if Viktor S. Chernomyrdin remains prime minister, as expected.

Some voters said they cast ballots for Yeltsin in the hope that Alexander I. Lebed would soon succeed him.

Lebed, a tough, retired general with an autocratic bent, finished third in the first round of voting June 16 and became Yeltsin’s defense and security czar in return for his endorsement.

But a lot of others said they would rather not think about such a scenario in a country that has never had a voluntary transition of power from one leader to another.

“Our country is so unpredictable, just like our Yeltsin,” said Nadezhda Ilina, 48, an engineer. “Anything can happen.”