Democracy in Russia Remains in Fragile State

The question long troubling Russia has been whether Boris N. Yeltsin would go gently into the good night of retirement next year, or continue to rage against the fading of his powers and try to stay in the Kremlin at all costs.

On Monday, for the first time, he offered an answer. In effect, Yeltsin said he’d go--but he wants to do it in his own way.

Russia has never experienced a transition of power from one democratically elected leader to another. The coming year, with elections for parliament in December and for president in June, will be an important test of whether democracy has taken root in the ruins of Soviet communism.

If it has, Russia’s immature offshoot bears feeble resemblance to what most Americans would call democracy.

“You can’t wipe out 70 years of communist indoctrination with 10 years of a faulty and partial democratic experiment,” said Alan Rousso, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank.

Monday’s events offered a good example. In a televised speech to the nation, Yeltsin pledged to make sure the upcoming elections were free and fair. But the candidate he nominated as his successor was not chosen through anything approaching a democratic process.

Security chief Vladimir V. Putin was picked by a cabal of Yeltsin advisors and financial oligarchs known as “The Family,” who operate in the Kremlin’s shadowy corners and want to preserve their influence in the next administration. And it remains to be seen whether they will let democracy take its course if their candidate doesn’t win.

The question took on added significance because Putin is one of the most dour and secretive members of the Cabinet. Commentators suggested that even the Kremlin’s mighty media machine would be unable to give him public appeal.

Some aspects of politics are little changed eight years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Leadership successions are dangerous and volatile, and the biggest decisions are made behind the scenes.

Most Russians see voting--whether by the Communist Party’s Central Committee in the old days or by the population as a whole--less as an open forum to express a choice than an endorsement of decisions already reached by political elites.

That’s why Russia’s political climate is so heated at the moment: Even though parliamentary elections are still more than four months away, a massive realignment of political forces is taking place largely out of public view.

Russia has few proper political parties that can groom, nominate and campaign for candidates. Instead, most major politicians have individual party organizations, and they scramble in advance of elections to form coalitions big enough to win the vote.

An important new coalition was formed last week by Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov and about two dozen powerful regional governors. Russian news reports suggested that the Kremlin put out feelers to see if the new alliance would consider supporting a joint candidate but was rebuffed.

Putin said he was told a day later that Yeltsin was planning to dismiss Prime Minister Sergei V. Stepashin and his entire Cabinet, and that he was a candidate for premier.

Philosophies tend to play a minor role in this political process; money and media access are much more important.

“There is a myth in Russia that with enough money and media, anyone can be made a president,” said Rousso.

Ultimately, what the Kremlin and Luzhkov and even the Communists want is not to build democracy per se. It’s to rebuild a kind of Russian ruling party that would ensure stability without resorting to Soviet-style political repression.

So far, while Yeltsin clearly wants to control his succession, his actions have been strictly within the bounds of the Russian Constitution, which gives him nearly a free hand to pick and dispose of prime ministers.

“He’s using constitutional procedures correctly,” said a Western diplomat. “I’m not sure he’s using them constructively.”

Scenarios for keeping Yeltsin in power beyond his term have been circulating in Moscow for weeks. One suggests that the Kremlin could use unrest in the Caucasus region as an excuse to impose a state of emergency and cancel elections. Another calls for Yeltsin to unite Russia and Belarus and get himself elected president of the unified state.

But suspending or violating the constitution would cost Yeltsin, who is increasingly mindful of his legacy as Russia’s first democratically elected president. In the end, his desire to polish and preserve that legacy may be his strongest incentive to let democracy take its course.

“Yeltsin wants to go down in history not as the dictator of a dying country but as the man who paved its way to a better future,” said Andrei V. Kortunov, president of the Moscow Public Science Foundation.

Others are less sanguine. They say that Yeltsin has already done much to damage democracy, writing a nearly unworkable, undemocratic constitution and ruling almost exclusively through his Kremlin coterie.

“Of course, Russia will survive even this,” said Alexander Vladislavlev, a political advisor to Luzhkov’s movement. “But it pains me that Yeltsin, who did so much for Russia, is now destroying his own work. For that reason, he may become one of the most tragic figures in our history.”