THE YELTSIN SURGE

By Bruce W. Nelan

Comeback kid does not translate well into Russian, but it fits Boris Yeltsin like his own blue suit. As 1996 began, the Russian President seemed out of it, unlikely even to survive the first round of voting that 11 candidates will face next Sunday. He was ailing, unsteady on his feet, glassy-eyed. His leadership and his policies looked just as moribund. His approval ratings moldered in the single digits, and his ambition to run for another term in the Kremlin seemed pointless.

Just look at him now. He is a campaigning dreadnought, wading into crowds from the black-earth zone of European Russia to Siberian forests, microphone in hand, bantering, pledging, urging. Wooing the youth vote in Ufa two weeks ago, his cheeks glowing, Yeltsin danced at a free rock concert, bellowing to thousands of Generation Xers, "Vote! Vote, or you'll damn well lose it all." At a state farm near Tver last week he promised workers, as he has everywhere, that he would pay their back salaries. "I'll give you the money, now that you have cornered me," he vowed. "But will you support me?"

Money, Yeltsin has discovered, talks. He has made so many similar promises to workers, teachers, soldiers and pensioners that last week he had to order Russia's disapproving central bank to fork over $1 billion to help pay for it all. In the past five weeks Yeltsin's appeal, according to most of Russia's unreliable opinion polls, has climbed steadily to equal or overtake his rivals'.

As Russia's epochal presidential campaign comes down to the voters, Yeltsin has managed to turn a contest on the fate of democratic reform into a two-man race with his main challenger, Communist Party leader Gennadi Zyuganov. After weeks of extraordinary, exuberant stumping and an unprecedented media blitz, Yeltsin the populist politician has been reborn, while some of the gas has gone out of the stolid Zyuganov's gloom-and-doom campaign. With nine other candidates in the race, neither of the front runners is expected to win outright--50% plus one--in the first round, but there is little doubt that they will face each other in a runoff in July.

Russians are a cynical lot, though, and a pervasive air of distrust clouds the entire enterprise. The Communists have been feeding voters dark tales of conspiracy, and even Yeltsin's supporters believe he will not allow himself to lose. By fair means or foul, citizens predict, Yeltsin is the present and future President. Of course if Zyuganov wins, Russians will also say he cheated. And whoever loses will charge the other with fraud.

The closeness of the contest has thrown the Communist candidate onto the defensive. Last week Zyuganov headed for Siberia, shunning critics in the big cities for the reassuring applause of the "red and passionate" in the remote Far East. There he wins heady applause from his natural constituency of pensioners and those left out of the new, rambunctious Russian society, who share his visions of impending apocalypse and lap up communism's promise to restore a mythic past of civil order and financial security.

But Zyuganov has been less successful in reassuring skeptics that he does not really intend to seize all their private property and bring back Soviet-era repression, as Yeltsin charges. Last week, casting about for a broader appeal that could get his bandwagon rolling again, he offered Cabinet posts to three other presidential hopefuls--the so-called third force of liberal economist Grigori Yavlinsky, retired General Alexander Lebed and eye surgeon Svyatoslav Fyodorov. Zyuganov had no success in wooing them--but neither did Yeltsin when he tried a similar approach last month.

Despite the impressive finish Yeltsin is staging, there are enough unknowns to give oddsmakers pause. The polls putting the President ahead are hard to trust. Samples are skewed because they are quite small and include mainly residents of urban areas, where telephones are more plentiful and voters favor Yeltsin. Russians also change their mind frequently in a campaign or do not tell pollsters the truth. Undecided voters may now be as many as 1 in 4.

Apathy, another word for distaste, is also a big problem. Yeltsin has been portraying election day as a choice between a democratic future and a return to the totalitarian communist past. Zyuganov has sought to define it as choosing for or against Russia. The voters do not see it either way, but as two bad choices that range from Y to Z: a self-proclaimed reformer who has produced insecurity, corruption and a faltering economy vs. an unrepentant communist who wants to reimpose central planning, nationalized industries and isolationism. Other candidates are perceived as losers who cannot make the second round.

While Yeltsin and his government control most of the mass media, he has no political party or electoral organization of his own. Out in the countryside the President is only a flickering TV image, while the Communists, who claim to have 25,000 local branches, can canvass door to door across the continent-size country and deliver voters to the polls. It is hard to calculate who comes out ahead in that trade-off.

Yeltsin has made no secret of his eagerness to harvest the support of the military. He declared a cease-fire in Chechnya and traveled to the Grozny airport to congratulate the army on its "victory." That is also why Yeltsin sticks with Defense Minister Pavel Grachev, who exerts a major political influence in addition to his military role and recently told the weekly Ogonyok that all the senior army commanders are "my creatures." Last week Grachev fueled charges of fraud when he flatly declared that all the overseas sailors voting early had chosen Yeltsin. If true, Grachev peeked; otherwise, commanders told their men how to vote.

Without a political party of his own, Yeltsin has little choice but to rely heavily on television and advertising. Among broadcasters who see their independence in jeopardy if he loses, Yeltsin's face dominates the regular news broadcasts. In addition, his campaign managers have produced a slick, soft-sell series of ad spots to boost his image as a leader. Yeltsin is not even in them, but celebrities and citizens appear to talk about their life and how scary it would be if the communists came back. The happy-talk presidential credo--I Believe, I Love, I Hope--appears everywhere, along with his slogan, Choose with Your Heart.

For all the fears of vote fraud, it may be difficult--but hardly impossible--for anyone to steal enough to matter. Paper ballots and sealed boxes will be used at 93,000 polling places, where 107.5 million people are eligible to vote. All parties have the right to station observers to watch the voting and the counting. The results will be passed to 2,722 territorial commissions, then to 89 regional headquarters and finally to the Central Election Commission in Moscow, under observation at each stage.

If they come out on top as expected, Yeltsin and Zyuganov will go on to the runoff, probably on July 7 or July 14. Analysts will be watching the size of the turnout in the first round for indicators of the final result. The way they calculate it, a large total vote helps Yeltsin because Zyuganov's base among the hard-core disgruntled is thought to level off at 25%. In Round 2 of the campaign, the leaders will scramble to pick up supporters from the nine failed candidates. Yeltsin is expected to win backers from Yavlinsky, Lebed and Fyodorov, while many of the nationalists favoring Vladimir Zhirinovsky could fall in behind Zyuganov.

Through it all, public suspicion will continue to fester. "Yeltsin may win honestly," says Paul Goble, an assistant director at Radio Free Europe, "but nobody in Russia is going to believe it." Naturally, Russians have already reduced the outcome to a joke: Yeltsin is asked what will happen if he wins the election. He replies, "Russia will have a new President." And if he loses? Yeltsin answers, "Then you will have your old President." New or old, the President may have revived his campaign, but he has not restored much respect for himself or the office he holds.

--Reported by Dean Fischer/Washington and John Kohan and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow

With reporting by DEAN FISCHER/ WASHINGTON AND JOHN KOHAN AND YURI ZARAKHOVICH/MOSCOW