Yeltsin himself is feeling the pinch at home. Russians seem to be suffering a prolonged bout of post-superpower blues– and eager to reproach the president, who garners only 7 percent support in recent polls. Communists, now the most popular party in Russia, and nationalists threaten to reverse four years of economic reform if they gain control of Parliament in December’s elections. Hard-liners complain that Yeltsin has sold out to the West, is not doing enough to torpedo the idea of NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe and has hewed to the sidelines in the Bosnia conflict. And nationalists, like Afghan-war hero Gen. Aleksandr Lebed, while blasting Yeltsin for launching the war in Chechnya, vow to rebuild Russia’s demoralized armed forces. Yeltsin’s tough talk last week was designed to shift the blame to his subordinates for his unpopular policies–and to signal to Washington that he would be no pushover during his three-hour meeting with Clinton.
The two presidents enjoy a warm personal rapport. But that may not be enough to settle some prickly issues between the two nations. Clinton and Yeltsin will discuss how to involve Russian troops in a multinational peacekeeping force in Bosnia. Moscow has unequivocally refused to put its troops under NATO command; NATO, in turn, has rejected a Russian suggestion for a joint or rotating command. Money, too, is at issue: Yeltsin claimed during the interview that it would cost $3 billion to send a Russian division, which his country couldn’t afford. Washington isn’t likely to help-not as long as Congress balks at the $1.5 billion price tag of sending American troops.
Even less likely is any agreement on NATO expansion. Last week Assistant Secretary of State Strobe Talbott tried to reassure Moscow officials that a growing Atlantic alliance–offering eventual membership to such countries as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic–posed no threat to Russia. He got nowhere. Yeltsin, echoing conservatives, made clear his opposition on French TV. “Can Russia allow this?” he blustered, his face even more flushed than usual. “Nyet, and once again nyet.” Yeltsin was equally adamant about another sore subject with Washington: the sale of Russian nuclear reactors to Iran. Since the equipment can’t be used to produce weapons, he insisted, why should he cancel the deal?
Yeltsin probably couldn’t change such policies even if he wanted to. He’s too weak politically–running a distant fourth in a public-opinion poll behind other presidential contenders in elections scheduled for June 1996. Even Yeltsin’s greatest success–economic reform, which has pushed inflation down to under 5 percent per month, stabilized the ruble and halted the nation’s industrial decline–has become a liability. Nearly nine out of 10 Russians, according to a recent poll, believe their lives are actually getting worse. That made it easy for Yeltsin to dump on Russia’s economic czar, Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, in his TV interview last week, even praising a political rival of the P.M.’s. The free-market economy, Yeltsin said in an echo of nationalist rhetoric, “creates corruption, the mafia and so on.”
But he reserved his harshest words for his foreign minister. Yeltsin’s most loyal and longest-serving aide, Kozyrev came to be identified first with the peaceful breakup of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, then with advocating much closer ties to the West. Hard-liners saw that as capitulation, blaming Kozyrev for Russia’s diminishing global clout and, most recently, for failing to advance their interests in Bosnia. In September, the lower house of Parliament voted to get rid of him–a move Yeltsin resisted until he fired Kozyrev on TV last week. “He has tried hard,” the president told viewers. “So let us not squash him.”
Far from squashing him, Yeltsin virtually reinstated Kozyrev the next day, on the eve of his trip to France and the United States. “The problem can be solved,” he hinted, by appointing an efficient deputy foreign minister. That style of leadership may not cut it anymore. There is growing talk of the Communists and nationalists joining forces after the December elections in an unprecedented “red-brown” majority coalition. Yeltsin would then have to reinvent himself in earnest, no longer able to rely on jabs at a shifting enemy, the sudden recall of a trusted adviser or a surprise poke in the back.
