MISSOURI COMMENTARY; RUSSIA'S AUTHORITARIAN LEGACY

Americans, by nature, are an impatient lot. We like instant solutions, instant cures, instant coffee, instant meals, instant replay. We want instant peace in Bosnia. We hoped for instant democracy in Russia.

Russia had no history of or experience with democracy and no political or social democratic infrastructure. Russia had been ruled by a centuries-old history of authorizationism. From this unpromising soil, no nation in Europe was less likely to blossom forth as a democratic flower.

When Mikhail Gorbachev loosed the Communist grip and Boris Yeltsin climbed up on the tank, we, as believers in all that is instant, saw Russia as a prompt convert to the joys of freedom, to the rule of law and to capitalism. Our hopes and anticipations have outstripped reality.

Last week's election results in Russia show that democracy is by no means firmly in place. On the positive side of the ledger, elections were held. They were fairly administered. Voter turnout was more than 60 percent, on that score exceeding comparable numbers here in the great cradle of democracy.

The bad news is that the bad guys won. The communists were the leading vote getters with about 22 percent. The erratic and buffoonish but dangerous nationalist, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, came in second with 11 percent (down from his 23 percent of two years ago). The relatively moderate Our House in Russia, headed by Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, ran third with 9.6 percent. The most reform-minded party, Yabloko, ran fourth with 7.6 percent.

No other party reached the threshold level of 5 percent, although a couple of them came close. With the proliferation of political parties and candidates all over the landscape, about half of the Russian voters will have cast their ballots for parties which failed to make it into the Duma.

Chernomyrdin is not a true blue reformer. He is, however, the closest thing you can find, a sort of political halfway house between the bad old past and the promised land of the future. With but one genuine progressive party making the cut, this election has to be considered as a severe blow to the concept of reform. The new Duma will have little impetus to privatize. It will be a far more difficult parliament to deal with for Boris Yeltsin.

Just as Americans want their instant pleasures, Russians now want some immediate, identifiable progress toward a better life. For many, especially the elderly, life under democracy has been exceedingly painful. For the elderly, talk about democracy doesn't put food in enough stomachs. With all of its tyranny and ugliness, the Communist regime did provide some degree of protection for the elderly -- which protection has evaporated under Yeltsin.

The reformers can't get their act together. They are scattered about in several factions. If they remain divided, the presidential election next June could be a disaster. Multiple reform candidates could result in a two-man runoff between the Communist nominee and Zhirinovsky.

Boris Yeltsin, sick and unsteady, may still be the reformers' best hope of pulling the disparate elements together. He's the best one to run a "it's me or disaster" campaign. Yeltsin can never win a campaign spelling out the demonstrable greatness that he has brought to Russia. To many there is no such thing as demonstrable greatness. But he is the best one to conjure up the ghosts of the Communist past.

Not only did the domestic precepts of the reform movement take a hit in the elections, but the notion of a more accommodating foreign policy took a beating as well. The Communists, Zhirinovsky and other, extreme candidates have all opted for a nationalistic Pat Buchananesque foreign policy. To many proud Russians, there is the sense that the United States is leading Yeltsin around by the nose.

Russia is not imminently heading over the political cliff. The world is not on the verge of another Cold War. It is, nonetheless, worrisome that Russia's best hope rests with someone as ill and undisciplined as Boris Yeltsin.

Just as the legacy of violence and hate will not swiftly pass in Bosnia, so too the legacy of authoritarianism will not soon disappear in Russia. The centuries-old authoritarianism of Tsars and Communists will not be erased in the time of Boris Yeltsin, his heirs or theirs.

~Tom Eagleton of St. Louis is a former U.S. senator from Missouri.