TIMES OF TURMOIL, YELTSIN STANDS ALONE

The futures of democracy in Russia, as well as of our diplomatic-political relationship with Moscow, are hanging by a thread. The thread has a name: Boris Yeltsin. He is barely in command of a nation that malfunctions somewhere between disorder and chaos.

We worry about Russia because it has 30,000 nuclear weapons. Although not a great power by virtually any other measure, it still has the capacity to disturb world order if it wants to be a meddlesome nuisance. A return to the authoritarianism that has been the norm throughout eight centuries of Russian history will make the world a messier, nastier place.

When Russian Communism fell in 1991, the West assumed that democracy was the only and inevitable alternative. We also believed that change could be helped along by us with a slight nudge and on the cheap. No grand program was required this time. No need for another Marshall Plan like the one we instituted to rebuild a shattered Western Europe after World War II. This time we would promise a lot and send a little. Instead of money, we would send some economists to give advice.

If we had developed a post-Communism assistance program and funded it on an equivalent basis with the Marshall Plan, we would by now have spent well over $100 billion in the Eastern European countries and well over $200 billion in Russia. At the end of World War II, we were victorious, rich, forward looking. We ruled the world. Half a century later, when it came time to help Russia, we were $4 trillion in debt, disenchanted with foreign aid and satisfied to rest on our laurels having defeated Communism.

Admittedly, restoring devastated capitalist Western Europe was an easier task than rebuilding the stagnant economies behind the Iron Curtain. Western Europe had laws, institutions and knowledge to absorb investment and put it to prudent use. Communist nations start from scratch. In the revitalization of Eastern Europe and Russia, there was an even greater need for a plan and programmed implementation. But the West had no plan, no program, no implementation -- other than to send in the professors.

As the Wall Street Journal puts it, "Aid has been fired like a scattershot at a flitting bird. Replacing communism with capitalism has been far trickier than the bricks-and-mortar salvaging of post-war Europe. Many aid dollars benefit donors more than donees...Skimpier Western aid hasn't done enough to promote mass enterprise or allay mass poverty. The market machinery hasn't provided the political breathing space to prevent the rise of a nationalist right or a socialist left."

That's Yeltsin's dilemma and, absent some miracles, the reason for his likely ultimate demise. We can cheer him on, but cheers won't change the moribund Russian economy and the pervasive poverty.

Yeltsin's pro-democracy slate was humiliated in the parliamentary elections. The reformers in his cabinet have jumped ship. Now the parliament -- designed to be impotent under the new constitution -- has flexed its muscles by ignoring Yeltsin's protestations and granting amnesty to the pro-authoritarian arch enemies who led the revolt against him last October. Remember that 140 lives were lost in subduing the leaders of that rebellion. Now they leave prison and are back on the street ready to challenge Yeltsin again.

The trajectory of Yeltsin's career is following a path of past Russian reformers of all stripes, Czarist, neo-democratic, or even Communist. Peter the Great, Alexander II, Serge Yulyevich Witte, Peter Stolypin, Alexander Kerensky, Nikita Khruschev, Mikhail Gorbachev -- each sought in different ways to liberalize Russian politics and society, and each saw his efforts thwarted. The next matrioschka doll in this series may well be Yeltsin.

Insofar as relations with the United States are concerned, Yeltsin will be further weakened by the fallout from the Aldrich Ames spy fiasco. Both the U.S. and Russia continue to spy on each other. Our CIA would be thrilled if the U.S. had a "mole" planted in the Russian intelligence apparatus with access to information comparable to that possessed by Ames and apparently given by him to the Soviets and later the Russians.

But the public attitude is that because we give Russia some aid, the Russians should not spy on us while we, of course, must continue to spy on them. Out of balance as this notion of one-sided spying may seem in logic, it nonetheless will affect the level of support the U.S. will provide Yeltsin. So the paltry amount of aid that we have been giving Yeltsin up to now may drop to minuscule.

More and more, Yeltsin stands alone. Someday he will be gone.