DEMOCRACY IN A WHIRL

By John Kohan/Moscow

NO ONE CAN SAY THAT RUSSIANS will lack for choice when they go to the polls this Sunday to elect a new national parliament. Establishment figures like Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin are running, but so too is Dzhuna Davitashvili, an extrasensory healer formerly employed by aging Politburo members. Both the Communist Party, a remnant of the Soviet monolith, and the Beer Lover's Party have fielded candidates. All together 5,000 candidates are vying for the 450 seats of the State Duma, the lower house of the country's two-tier Federal Assembly. It would be no exaggeration to say Russia is experiencing an explosion of democracy, although it is not in a style that most Westerners would recognize.

Notwithstanding the curiosities of the campaign, a serious issue lies at its heart. The election has essentially become a vote of confidence on President Boris Yeltsin's economic reforms and their high social cost. "This is the ideal moment for those who want to turn back the clock," says Moscow political commentator Otto Latsis. "The price has been paid for reform, but the average person will not see the results for several more years."

A great shift in the vote to opponents of Kremlin economic policies, such as the communists or the nationalists, could mark the beginning of the end of the reformist cycle that started after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. The powers of the parliament have been so watered down in the new constitution that it is virtually impossible for Deputies to remove Yeltsin from office. But a solid Yeltsin opposition with a majority in the new parliament could obstruct government-reform policies. The result would be a return to the debilitating power struggle that triggered Yeltsin's dramatic 1993 showdown with the old parliament.

There is a good chance, however, that such a coalition will not emerge and that the new parliament will prove just as fractious and querulous as the old one. The communists have consistently held the lead in public-opinion polls, but they are still favored by no more than 20% of the voters. If as many as 10 political groups manage to break the 5% barrier to get into parliament, the communists would have to do some major horse trading with projected winners like Women of Russia and the Agrarian Party to create an anti-Yeltsin alliance.

Whatever the outcome of the parliamentary elections, the decisive confrontation between what Latsis calls "the powers that be and the forces of revenge" will really come in June 1996, when Russians are scheduled to vote for a new President. On the mend after his second hospital stay for heart troubles in just over three months, Yeltsin has not ruled out a re-election bid, and will say nothing about his plans until after the new parliament is elected. Nevertheless, every Russian knows that the current campaign is a dress rehearsal for next year's vote. At least five candidates from Russia's leading parties are considered strong presidential contenders. Here are the men who, after the ballots are tallied, will probably emerge as key combatants in the battle for the Kremlin.

VICTOR CHERNOMYRDIN Holding the Roof On

On bright, tricolor billboards all across Moscow, Chernomyrdin earnestly appeals to voters to cast their ballots for Our Home Is Russia, the political movement he founded last April in a bid to create a strong centrist party loyal to the Kremlin. IF YOUR HOME IS DEAR TO YOU, the slogan reads.

The former boss of Russia's rich gas industry, Chernomyrdin, 57, was chosen by Yeltsin as Prime Minister in 1992. Discontent with the government runs so high that his incumbency has proved to be a burden. He should count himself lucky if his party finishes in third place. A complete rout could ruin his chances to replace Yeltsin as the standard-bearer of reform in June should the President decide not to run.

ALEXANDER LEBED General in Shining Armor

Even though Lebed, 45, now dresses in pinstripe suits, his bayonet-straight bearing and telegraphic speech immediately mark him as a military man. He is the former commander of Russia's 14th Army in the breakaway Trans-Dniestr region of the republic of Moldova, and he appeals to voters who yearn for a plainspoken general on a white charger to put things in order.

Opinion polls show that Lebed leads the platoon in the presidential race. He is a winning campaigner. When asked by a reporter in the provincial city of Tula whether he had the makings of a tyrant, Lebed described himself as "the very personification of compromise," pointing to his peacemaking role in the war-torn Trans-Dniestr region. A female fan asked him to "smile more often," and he plaintively replied, "What can I do if I was born with this face?"

GRIGORI YAVLINSKY Democratic Wunderkind

At a rally in the Writers' Union House in Moscow, Yavlinsky, 43, leader of the Yabloko bloc, managed to win a few laughs from his earnest audience. During the election campaign, he quipped, the government has promised to do just about everything "except restore virginity." Turning to the topic of the President's health, Yavlinsky wanted to know if "Kremlin" orders would now have to be described as decisions by "the Central Clinical Hospital." It was just the sort of display of intelligence and humor that have made the boyish-looking economist the darling of Moscow's liberal intellectuals ever since he first gained prominence in 1990 as the author of a never-to-be-realized 500-Day Plan for the economic makeover of Russia.

Yavlinsky's party, Yabloko, is the only reform-minded opposition group with a serious chance to win a large number of seats this election year. In democratic strongholds like St. Petersburg, the group tops party preference polls, attracting white-collar professionals. Yavlinsky has kept his personal ratings high by shunning coalitions with other reformers who have been tainted by involvement in the Yeltsin administration.

VLADIMIR ZHIRINOVSKY Past His Peak?

Taking full advantage of seven minutes of free TV time last week, ultranationalist Zhirinovsky expounded his unique view of the world with all the subtlety of a firing Kalashnikov. Barely taking a breath, he railed against the country's new bankers, threatened to rain napalm down on villagers in the Caucasus region who kill Russian soldiers, and promised every hungry Russian a bowl of soup. "Russian fathers, do you know where your daughters are?" Zhirinovsky asked. "They're selling their bodies to buy clothes and cosmetics!"

Times have changed since the 49-year-old lawyer and his misnamed Liberal Democratic Party exploded onto the Russian political scene with a sensational 22.9% of the vote in the December 1993 parliamentary elections. Now, after two years of his bad-boy antics, the Russian electorate appears to be growing weary of Zhirinovsky. Although he can count on enough support from his solid following among the lumpen proletariat to remain a disturbing force in the new parliament, he will have to share the protest vote that brought him to power in 1993 with Lebed, former Vice President Alexander Rutskoi and a host of other patriotic-minded candidates who did not--or could not--run in the last elections. GENNADI ZYUGANOV Riding a Wave of Nostalgia

Standing in front of a huge bust of Vladimir Lenin, Communist Party leader Zyuganov, 51, sounds very much like the teacher he once was as he cites fact and figure on Russia's economic and social woes at a campaign rally in the rural Russian city of Kaluga. The situation in Russia, he says, is "a catastrophe worse than the invasions of the Tatars, Napoleon and Hitler combined." The mostly over-50 crowd, packed into the "culture palace" of a factory, constantly interrupts Zyuganov with applause, especially when he takes a gibe at Yeltsin and wonders out loud "why you have to be sober to drive a bus but not to run the country."

Zyuganov is more flexible about following the old party line than most of his followers, but even if their leader may sometimes sound like a Social Democrat, Russia's half a million communists today represent the most hard-line core of the party that once had 18 million members. If voters need any reminding of communism's horrors, the "Forward, Russia!" party of economist Boris Fyodorov has put up a huge poster in Moscow reading: 50 MILLION VICTIMS OF CIVIL WAR, COLLECTIVIZATION AND REPRESSION WOULD NOT VOTE FOR ZYUGANOV. The trouble for Yeltsin and Russia's beleaguered reformers is that on Dec. 17, much of the electorate probably will.