RUSSIA: FOR MIRACLES OR FOR NIGHTMARES

The world is not a completely happy place. The new world order never took hold. The pre-World War II disorder has re-emerged. What order we did have -- the U.S. vs. U.S.S.R., East vs. West, communism vs. democracy -- has vanished after a close to half century reign.

So now we have a plate full of various problems: Bosnia, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Haiti, Somalia and Russia. Most of all Russia. We will somehow cope with all the rest. World stability will not, in final analysis, be shaped by events in Sarajevo, Pyongyang, Baghdad, Teheran, Port au Prince or Mogadishu. World stability in the next century, could well be shaped by events in Moscow.

The nature of the United States/Russia relationship has always been a relationship with the one man at the top. Whether it was a Romanov Tsar, a Communist autocrat like Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev or Gorbachev, or now a President Yeltsin, America had a "foreign policy of one," the one Russian or Soviet at the top. When one man at the top was in unquestioned control, that pragmatic approach made sense. When the man at the top had only a tenuous grip on power -- Gorbachev in his later years, Yeltsin in all of his years -- then the "one man" foreign policy itself becomes tenuous.

As much as we would like to think otherwise, Boris Yeltsin is no longer the man in control. Once the toast of the world when he throttled communism's last gasp, he is a man increasingly disliked by his people and even by those once deemed to be closest to him. He spends less and less time at his desk and is less and less in control.

Yeltsin promised President Clinton that economic reform will continue, but as soon as Clinton departed, the reformers began to hit the road. First it was Yegor Gaidar, the self-styled reform tsar of Russia. Out went Stephen Sachs, the Harvard professor and self-anointed reform tsar of all of Eastern Europe. Finally, the Finance Minister, Boris Fyodorov took the hint.

Russia, it is said, now has reform but no reformers. But in reality, the ghosts from the past take over key positions and formulate basic policy: heavy subsidies out of the bankrupt treasury to ancient, non-competitive industries and agricultural co-operatives. The new cabinet has decided that it is best to have the central bank provide huge subsidized credits to factories and farms rather than face the enormous discontent of widespread unemployment if the factories were to close and the farms were privatized.

The shift from communism to capitalism has been far more painful than the West was prepared to appreciate. The dream was that an efficient entrepreneurial class would spring forth and convert Russia from a peasant economy to a sylvan paradise of free enterprise.

The sylvan paradise is a playground of racketeers. Former Ambassador Jack Matlock predicted in 1988 that "all of the investment within Russia will inevitably come from the Russian mafia." He was correct.

Stephen Sachs, the ousted wizard, tells us that his "shock therapy" didn't work in Russia because, even though his plan was perfect, the International Monetary Fund screwed it up.

In the fall of 1993, a group of leading Sovietologists and Russian specialists met at the U.S. Naval War College. Even before Vladimir Zhirinovsky's remarkable electoral showing, a substantial majority of those experts said that the die was cast: Russia would inevitably drift deeper into xenophobia, chauvinism and "Great Russian" autocracy. The experts appear to be correct.

It's all so sad, so worrisome and, in part, so predictable. To assume that the Russians, with no historic experience with democracy or free enterprise, would take a "cold bath" and wake up with a spontaneous reverence for the work ethic and a love of the Western world was to have expected a miracle. Russia isn't made for miracles. It's more for nightmares.

The reform days are over. The racketeers and the old guard are in charge. Russia's pseudo romance with democracy may well have died before it was ever born.