THE BORIS YELTSIN BLUES

By PAUL QUINN-JUDGE/MOSCOW

By all accounts, Russian president Boris Yeltsin is on the mend. He was released from the hospital last week to continue his recovery from a bout of pneumonia at his dacha outside Moscow. Compared with the serious heart problems and the complex bypass surgery he endured last fall, his present illness seems minor.

And after all, he is only one man. The U.S. kept ticking away when Dwight Eisenhower suffered from serious illnesses. When Ronald Reagan was severely wounded, the government kept working. The diagnosis of Francois Mitterrand's ultimately fatal cancer early in his presidential term didn't stop France from functioning.

Yet Yeltsin's current disability has thrown Russia into a state of paralysis and gloom even worse than that produced last fall when the extent of his heart problems became known. Why?

There are several answers, none of them reassuring. Most important, Yeltsin presides over a system that was built with one purpose: to give him as much power as possible and reduce to an absolute minimum the political latitude of both parliament and his own ministers. Second, Yeltsin is profoundly jealous of anyone who tries to steal his limelight, and during his illness he has divided caretaker duties between presidential chief of staff Anatoli Chubais and Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin, two men whose approaches to politics and government are diametrically opposed. The result, as the President undoubtedly intended, is political stalemate. The third answer is that Russia has no time to lose; it is still stumbling along a rocky path to economic, constitutional and political reform, and it cannot afford to stop.

On top of all this, Yeltsin's pneumonia seems to have produced a striking side effect: a collapse of confidence among his aides and top supporters. When Yeltsin faced surgery last fall, his entourage declared its support for the man and expressed enthusiasm about the future. But when pneumonia was diagnosed in early January, "a lot of the President's supporters and aides said, 'That's it,'" recalls a Yeltsin adviser. Some prominent supporters are quietly distancing themselves from the President; others are gravitating toward people like Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov or Alexander Lebed. There have been some nasty bursts of political infighting within the presidential camp recently, aimed particularly at Chubais. There is little expectation among many Yeltsin loyalists that, barring a miracle, he will recover completely. "Make no mistake about it," said the adviser. "We are in a state of stagnation."

Optimists argue that Russia is used to a sick President. It endured the lingering of Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov. Mitterrand's France is cited as a hopeful parallel. But this argument is flawed, says Sergei Blagovolin, director general of ORT, the largest TV company in Russia, and a member of the President's advisory council: "France was not on the very edge of a crisis. We are."

The reform-minded politicians, businessmen and academics who worked for Yeltsin's electoral victory last year had hoped to goad Yeltsin into action by appealing to his desire for a prominent place in history. They wanted structural reform of the country's outdated industrial sector, along with dramatic measures to encourage foreign investment. They wanted a new tax code to replace the current unwieldy and unenforceable law. And they wanted to restore law and order. None of this has happened, nor is likely to happen in the foreseeable future.

Despite postelection euphoria, 1996 turned out to be, in the words of commentator Otto Latsis, "the lost year for reform." More than 30 million people are earning less than Russia's minimum wage. The transformation of Russia's bloated conscript army into a much smaller, more efficient and better-armed fighting machine has not begun. In foreign policy, Yeltsin's more liberal aides had hoped to move Russia further into the mainstream of international relations. Instead, Moscow is bogged down in an ill-tempered exchange with the West over NATO's expansion plans. Western diplomats say the President's absence injects uncertainty into their negotiations with Foreign Minister Yevgeni Primakov. And Primakov himself has been the target of sniping--said by some to originate with Chubais--which risks further weakening Russia's negotiating position.

The hopes last fall for major reforms were always overly optimistic. The President's onetime press secretary, Vyacheslav Kostikov, says in an as yet unpublished memoir that Yeltsin's mood, morale and appetite for work all took a turn for the worse as early as 1994. The nasty little secret in the history of Boris Yeltsin's Kremlin is that the President was in decline long before his health began to fail openly last year.