Sidelined Yeltsin a Dilemma for Raw Democracy

The disclosure that President Boris N. Yeltsin is sidelined by a chronic disorder that could impair his brain function poses the latest challenge to Russia’s fledgling democracy: what to do with a disabled leader.

With 19 months remaining in his second term, independent Russia’s first and only elected president has become a figurehead who has difficulty fulfilling even a ceremonial role. Nevertheless, in the tradition of czars and dictators before him, Yeltsin, 67, is likely to cling to power as long as he is physically able.

The president checked into the Barvikha sanatorium outside Moscow on Tuesday for rest and treatment of what the Kremlin is calling “neuro-psychological asthenia,” a broad term whose meaning can range from depression to dementia.

The Kremlin’s announcement Monday that the condition will require the president to relinquish important day-to-day duties raises the question of how long Russia--already reeling from the collapse of its economy--can survive without a strong leader.

With Yeltsin out of action, the job of holding the country together falls to untested Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov, who will now have even greater responsibility for finding a solution to the nation’s financial crisis.

Under the Russian Constitution, Primakov would become acting president if Yeltsin resigned or died in office and would have three months to hold new presidential elections.

“Qualitatively, the political situation in Russia has now undergone a major shift,” said Victor A. Kremenyuk, deputy director of the USA-Canada Institute in Moscow. “It has finally become clear not only to President Yeltsin’s enemies but to people from his own entourage that urgent presidential elections are now unavoidable.”

While Yeltsin’s foes immediately renewed their calls for the president to step down, some political analysts argued that it is imperative for the development of democracy that the president serve out his full term. Elections in the midst of the economic crisis would provoke turmoil and social unrest, they say.

“It is absolutely crucial that we learn not to oust someone we just elected as our president,” said Dmitri Y. Furman, senior researcher at the Institute of Europe. “We would nip in the bud the very idea of a democratic society.”

While the Kremlin’s disclosure that Yeltsin suffers from “asthenia” indicates a debilitating illness, his career has been marked by his ability to overcome adversity.

He recovered from a heart attack and quintuple bypass surgery in 1996, though he has stayed out of the public eye much of the time since then. Some, like Houston heart surgeon Michael DeBakey, who has advised Russian doctors treating the president’s heart condition, predict that he will bounce back from this illness too.

In a land where ordinary people have long depended on autocrats to make decisions for them, the absence of leadership could not come at a worse time: Commerce is paralyzed, the currency has plunged in value, and much of the country has reverted to a medieval system of barter to obtain goods.

Russia has had no more success in developing democracy than it has had in building a capitalist economy.

Rather than establishing democratic traditions, Yeltsin has created a system that depends on a strong president.

With Yeltsin having held power since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has never experienced the kind of peaceful transition from one democratically elected leader to the next that other nations take for granted.

Five years ago, Yeltsin abolished the vice presidency and forced through a new constitution--written just for him--that granted the president tremendous powers and made it almost impossible to remove him from office.

He has never elevated an heir apparent; just the reverse, he has squelched the rise of possible successors, fearing that they could become his rivals.

During his six weeks in office, Primakov has given no indication that he will be any more dynamic than the ailing Yeltsin. The low-key prime minister has kept his public appearances to a minimum and has yet to propose a plan to end Russia’s financial crisis--despite repeated pledges by the government that a plan is forthcoming.

On Tuesday, Primakov, a former foreign minister, flew to Vienna to take Yeltsin’s place at meetings with leaders of the European Union.

Presidential spokesman Dmitri Yakushkin said the president was “upset” that he was forced by doctors Monday to cancel his visit to Austria at the last minute.

Andrei A. Piontkovsky, director of the Independent Institute for Strategic Studies, a Moscow-based think tank, said the decision was a watershed event that marked the end of a struggle within Yeltsin’s inner circle over whether to keep the president’s illness hidden or allow him to retire gradually.

“Yeltsin will become a purely token figure now,” Piontkovsky said. “His powers and responsibilities will be confined to merely ‘sticking around’ and performing the vague function of a ‘guarantor of the current constitution.’ ”

The Kremlin has a long history of concealing the health of Russia’s leaders. When Yeltsin suffered a heart attack just before his reelection in 1996, the Kremlin announced that he had a cold.

Yeltsin has seldom been seen in public recently, but he appears on television every now and then in footage taped, edited and released by the Kremlin.

On the rare occasions when he has answered questions in public, his speech has been punctuated by long pauses, and he sometimes appears to lose his train of thought.

Yeltsin was forced to cut short a trip to the Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan earlier this month after he stumbled at a welcoming ceremony and later developed a bad cough. The Kremlin reported that he had bronchitis.

This week’s meeting in Vienna apparently forced Yeltsin, his advisors and his doctors to confront the question of whether the president was healthy enough to continue making international trips and public appearances.

Yakushkin said the visit would have been “a litmus test” of Yeltsin’s condition. The president “realized that everybody would have concentrated on how he moves and talks instead of following the agenda for the talks,” the press secretary said.

“The president did not want to take the risk because he was rather upset by having read what the newspapers wrote about him following his visits to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan,” he said.

For Yeltsin, the decision to give in to the doctors is another indication that his condition is more than a passing problem. The dynamic leader who stood on a tank outside the Russian White House seven years ago to rally the democratic opposition during an attempted coup has turned into a sick, old man.