Doctors were releasing little information about the Russian president’s condition, except to reassure reporters that he’d never lost consciousness. But a Kremlin source told NEWSWEEK that Yeltsin had briefly blaeked out, slumped on his desk, before a doctor revived him. Just as worrisome, the only people allowed into his hospital room are his immediate family and bodyguards, some of whom have been known to double as political advisers – and not liberal ones.
There’s never been a good time for the president of Russia to collapse, and this isn’t one of them, either. Even if nuclear Armageddon no longer looms, there are still some deals Washington would like to do with Yeltsin. Most pressing is the peacekeeping force for Bosnia. Though the two presidents failed to work out details, they at least agreed the Russians should participate in some way. Deciding exactly how will grow more urgent if the three warring parties in the former Yugoslavia reach a peace agreement at talks scheduled to open in Dayton, Ohio, this week. Despite Yeltsin’s tough anti-NATO talk, he has accommodated the Clinton team on most issues they care about: economic reform, arms control, nuclear proliferation. “If you look back over his career, you have to say that Yeltsin is a Westernizer,” says Nikolai Andreyev, an editor at the weekly Obshchava Gazeta.
If Yeltsin goes, does reform go with him? It’s a familiar question to those who remember the final days of Mikhail Gorhaehev, and it’s just as relevant now as it was then-maybe more so. Back in 1991, Boris Yeltsin was an outspoken liberal, and the reins of power fell right from Gorbachev’s hands into his. This time round, it won’t he so simple. The former communists appear likely to win parliamentary elections slated for Dee. 17. Gen. Aleksandr Lebed, a gruff-spoken nationalist with his own Congress of Russian Communities, has been stirring up big support on the campaign trail. If his slate of candidates does well, Lebed will be even better positioned for presidential elections next June. Meanwhile, the candidate Washington quietly prefers, the businesslike Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, recently declared that he wouldn’t run for president (not everyone believes him), and his party, Our Home Is Russia, performed limply in a recent provincial by-election. Should Yeltsin die in office, Chernomyrdin would succeed him – but must call presidential elections within three months.
If some combination of Communists and nationalists – what Russians call a “red-brown coalition” – were to come to power in December, it’s not clear what that would mean, even if Yeltsin were still in the picture. The nationalist demagogue Vladimir Zhirinovsky terrified the West, and the Yeltsin regime, too, when he won a plurality in the Duma two years ago. His wild rhetoric forced Yeltsin to take a more conservative bent but didn’t fundamentally alter Russia’s direction. Similarly, the young capitalist class in Moscow believes that former communists, despite their talk of slowing privatization and re-installing government control over the economy, have actually bought into reform-even literally. Plenty of old communist managers are now shareholders themselves, and they like it that way. They may talk of rejecting cooperation with the West, but Russia simply doesn’t have the strength to reassert its former empire.
Still, Russia has clearly fallen out of love with the West, and that coolness (as in all failed romances) seems permanent. As ever, Russians still assume Western products are superior to theirs and that life in Western countries is easier: emigration remains high. But the sweeping euphoria about all things Occidental-a hallmark of the Gorbachev years–has long passed. So has the assumption that Western policies toward Russia are founded on good faith and good sense. Russian leaders suspected of pro-Western leanings now have to work doubly hard to counteract that perception. Yeltsin himself–the man U.S. policy is wrapped around–said in September that NATO expansion “will mean a conflagration of war throughout all of Europe, for sure, for sure.” This is the fellow who, on his first-ever trip to the Statue of Liberty in 1989, was moved to declare, “When I circled her twice in a helicopter, I felt twice as free as when I started.”
In truth, despite all the backslapping between the Russian and American presidents last week, the White House has always found Yeltsin to be a weird friend. Even as they watched the mutual hilarity, one Clinton aide confessed later, “we were wondering what Yeltsin might do next.” Maybe grab abaton and start conducting, as he did at a military ceremony in Berlin last year. And with a serious heart condition, the unpredictable Russian president becomes even more so. “There’s the possibility of political illness as well as physical illness,” says a Kremlin official. “He’s too divorced from reality. His statements are contradictory and it’s making things worse.”
Yeltsin’s very, unpredictability makes it dangerous to count him out. He’s staged more than one successful comeback. But as a man who’s eaten too much fatty food, drunk too much vodka and suffered far too much stress on the job, Yeltsin has already outperformed the actuarial tables. He’s 64, and the life span of the average Russian male is only 57. “A man must live like a great bright flame and burn as brightly as he can,” Yeltsin once declared. “In the end he burns out. But this is better than a mean little flame.” That’s the kind of rhetoric that beguiled the Russian electorate in the first place. The idea that Yeltsin might die now, or at least pass from the scene, makes a lot of Russians nervous-they’ve had enough instability to last a lifetime-but his flame doesn’t burn very brightly for anyone anymore. This, it seems, is the autumn of Yeltsin. It may be a long Russian winter ahead.
