WHAT NOW FOR RUSSIA?

It’s impossible to understand this country with cold reason, cautioned 19th century poet Fyodor Tyutchev: “In Russia, you can only believe.”

Grigory A. Tsvetkov, a computer programmer, is one 20th century Russian whose faith has run out.

The 45-year-old Muscovite’s salary has been whittled by economic crisis to the equivalent of less than $20 a month. It was August when he last was paid. He wants to emigrate with his wife and children, ages 13 and 15.

“We were ready to wait and struggle for five, 10 years, but seven years have passed, and our leading democrats we trusted and loved turned out to be thieves and liars, our president turned into a senile old man who doesn’t care, simply doesn’t care, about his people,” said the bearded and bespectacled Tsvetkov, who has been importing and selling used cars from Germany and France to support his family. “To put it briefly, we want to have a normal life now--and not in a generation or two.”

Where once in post-Soviet Russia there was wildly optimistic talk about becoming a “normal, civilized country” in a decade or less, there is deep, pervasive gloom. Many, if not most, people wonder whether things will ever improve.

This autumn, a survey of 1,500 Russians found existence of late has become so much worse that fully half of those polled “don’t know how they are going to live further.”

“Where did we go wrong?” the director of a regional hospital asked as she flew recently on a Tupolev jetliner to St. Petersburg for a refresher course in medicine.

Also unpaid for months, the physician, in her late 60s, slipped the pat of butter from the airline meal into her pocket as she described how her hospital had no more funds to purchase pharmaceuticals or meet staff salaries.

“Perhaps we didn’t have the right people at the top,” she said.

Political paralysis in Russia ended with the September appointment as prime minister of Yevgeny M. Primakov, former foreign minister, head of the espionage service and Soviet-era Communist Party apparatchik. But distressing, seemingly insoluble economic problems, and dashed expectations, remain.

“In 1991, the regime of which everybody had been sick and tired collapsed, but people had savings, enthusiasm and hopes,” Alexander I. Lebed, a former Soviet army general who hopes to use his position as governor of the Krasnoyarsk region as a springboard to the presidency, said recently in Moscow. “Today they have nothing of this. No savings. Their hopes are almost dead. The credit of trust is almost used up.”

In contrast with the euphoria that crested with the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991, many thoughtful Russians believe that their homeland has entered a long and dreary phase of economic hard times and of inglorious political leadership.

For the United States, the fate of this former superpower is of great concern if only because it possesses about 10,240 nuclear warheads. In Washington, where a State Department official has likened Russia to a car that is spinning wildly after hitting a patch of ice, the debate is over whether Russia has been “lost”--and if so, who lost it.

Two competing scenarios--the return to some sort of socialism or the rise of a nationalist strongman--are said by some observers to be possible, but not as likely as a long, gray period of muddling through. Disappointed with a decade’s worth of leaders who first promised a reformed Soviet system, then Western-level politics and economic bounty, many Russians are no longer ready to believe in anyone offering a miracle.

A crimson banner hanging near the White House, seat of the Russian government, sums up prevailing suspicions succinctly and rudely: “All bosses are bastards.”

“Our people do not trust anyone anymore--they do not trust the government, they do not trust their neighbors, they do not trust the rest of the world,” said Dmitri Y. Furman, a Russian historian. “But what is most important, they have lost faith in themselves. A nation that has never had a chance to determine its own fate does not trust its own judgment.

“But least of all,” Furman added, “they trust the so-called elite, the highest echelons of power, which for decades attracted like a magnet the most despicable, unworthy, dishonest and immoral members of society--the ones who were capable of surviving in the Communist Party machine and rising to the very top.”

A Disastrous Plunge in Living Standards

For a people who endured decades of socialist shortages and bread lines, the free market promised to be a veritable horn of plenty. Perhaps it will prove to be yet. But the short-run results for many, if not most, Russians are little short of catastrophic.

According to Graham Allison of Harvard University, a former assistant secretary of Defense, ordinary citizens here have suffered, on average, a 75% plunge in living standards under President Boris N. Yeltsin’s rule. That is almost twice the decline in Americans’ income during the Great Depression.

Veniamim S. Sokolov, public accountant of the Audit Chamber, a government watchdog agency that tracks state expenditures, recently estimated that Russia was $200 billion in debt, while $300 billion had been pillaged and covertly transferred overseas.

It sounds like a one-liner from “The Tonight Show,” but Russia’s economy is performing so poorly that the Federal Security Service, the spy agency that is heir to the KGB, has said it will have to let some employees go.

“We pinned all our hopes on the free market, which we believed would cure the country and rectify all wrongs,” said Pavel G. Bunich, an economist and lawmaker in the lower house of parliament who is also a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. “Instead, we ended up with utter anarchy and disorder. We have a situation when everything is allowed, when thieves of all sorts have ripped the country off and gotten away with it, for there were no laws.”

So the moroseness of the moment is understandable. But deeper and more subtle processes also have been at work in Russian society in the 1990s, which make the current question--whither Russia?--more difficult to answer.

Civil liberties, such as the freedom to speak one’s mind, that the Soviet Communists tried to eradicate as bourgeois perversions have taken root speedily and firmly in Russian soil. So has the concept of private property--one former high-ranking Soviet official in the current government holds a controlling interest in half a dozen business ventures.

And a land that deliberately kept itself isolated--Russians in the 1960s could not understand Beach Boys songs played over the Voice of America radio because dictionaries here did not include the word “surfing,” which Russians assumed was an obscene synonym for fornicating--has proved eager to rejoin the rest of the world. In the heart of Siberia, halfway around the globe from Hollywood, a newspaper on sale this autumn was carrying jokes about the movie “Titanic.”

“I would not wholly subscribe to the point of view that one of the pillars of Western civilization, namely the principle of democracy, has not worked in Russia,” political analyst Andrei A. Piontkovsky, usually a blistering critic of present-day Russia, told a foreign journalist. “For if that were so, we would not be able to have this interview, and I’d have to think many times before telling you what I really thought.”

There are competing diagnoses of the changes experienced by Russia in recent years. One argument says that this continent-sized nation skirted by Roman law, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment--in short, by the formative experiences of the West--does not have it in its collective gene pool to be democratically governed and prosperous.

“One has to bear a great deal of faith and love in one’s heart in order to keep any hope at all for the future of the most powerful of the Slav tribes,” T.N. Granovsky, a prominent Russian scholar, sadly wrote to a friend abroad. That was in 1854. Events in the next few years will show whether, once again, the pessimists are right about Russia.

Underlying the new government’s obvious priorities--shoring up the ruble, paying back wages, ensuring people have food and heat during the winter--is an urgent psychological task: winning back people’s trust. It may be mission impossible; one poll this autumn found that Yeltsin’s approval rating was a mere 1%.

With disconcerting regularity, Russian television has been showing the populace its sick and sometimes befuddled leader. Recently, after a bizarre public exchange between Primakov and Yeltsin’s spokesman, it was uncertain whether Yeltsin was being kept informed about even the most crucial matters of state.

“Unfortunately, there’s not much money, there’s a lot of people to be loved, and we have to combine that,” Russia’s president--his words slurred, his pasty face contorted from hamming for the camera--said in one surreal televised moment.

Late last month, aides to the 67-year-old Yeltsin said he was suffering from a debilitating disorder that will force him to play less of a role in government. He may not be able to serve out his full term, which runs until 2000. On the other hand, nothing compels him to leave office immediately.

“We have a czar again, who can sit in the Kremlin and drink,” a 60-year-old tourist from the Urals, Yeltsin’s home region, lamented during a visit to the Stalingrad battle memorial in Volgograd.

Stranded in ‘a Land of Permanent Promises’

There are already many hopeful successors--the retired Gen. Lebed, Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov, Russian Communist leader Gennady A. Zyuganov, liberal economist Grigory A. Yavlinsky. Their challenge will be to build a nationwide base of support and staunch the hemorrhage of popular confidence in Russia’s leaders.

Can it be done? Perhaps not. In 1992, a team of young Russian liberals lifted socialist-era economy controls, and Russians saw prices soar by more than 2,000%. Another, supposedly reformist plan to give each citizen an equal share in the businesses and industry built under the Soviets resulted in wealth and political power rapidly falling into the hands of a few nouveaux riches known as the oligarchs.

Last August, under Primakov’s predecessor, political neophyte Sergei V. Kiriyenko, Russia in effect devalued its currency, defaulted on government treasury bills and delayed the repayment of private debts to foreigners. The ruble tumbled, big banks shut their doors, and Russia’s leaders discredited themselves again.

“Yet another time, the government has told its people, ‘You can’t rely on us,’ ” said Vladimir A. Poleshchuk, deputy governor of the Kemerovo region, an area of Siberia as large as Maine.

Like many of his fellows elsewhere in the country, Poleshchuk is now working to insulate his region economically and politically from the whims of the capital.

Russia, with one dominant ethnic group, language and culture, seems in no serious danger of spinning apart, as did the Soviet Union. However, the logic of events should continue to drain power and influence from inside Moscow’s Ring Road to the country’s 89 oblasts, republics and other constituent areas.

“Now it is clear--the transition will take decades, with retreats, defeats and crisis,” Anatoly B. Chubais, the former head of Russia’s privatization program that turned into a fire sale of state assets to insiders, told a Moscow newspaper recently. His biggest mistake, Chubais said, was to believe that the Russian economy could be reinvented in a few years.

In this season of uncertainty, Alexi II, patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, has been urging his flock to have courage and be patient. The Orthodox prelate even went to a Moscow picture gallery in September to pray to the Virgin of Vladimir, the icon said to have saved the Russian capital from invading Mongol horsemen six centuries ago.

“We believe that the Lord will spare our motherland misfortunes, suffering and civil strife,” Alexi said.

Tsvetkov, the computer programmer who wants to emigrate, now believes that it will take a generation, maybe two, for things in Russia to stabilize.

“We want to live in a normal country,” he said, “where if you have a job, you know that you can buy the things you want, you can pay rent and have an apartment or house, you can go to the hospital and expect to be treated rather than humiliated, cheated and murdered, where you can put your money in a bank or a mutual fund and not wake up in a cold sweat every night worrying about it, where you can trust your government leaders, where you can at least understand what they say on television and not be ashamed of them.

“I am sick and tired of this sort of living in a land of permanent promises, that looks like a huge dirty railway station where all the trains are late or going the wrong way,” Tsvetkov said. “Now I know my train will never arrive. I am stranded at the wrong station.”

Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.