
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, October 5, 1993                   TAG: 9403100017
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

RUSSIA'S BLOODY ROAD FORWARD

SO BORIS Yeltsin is not to have his peaceful coup. The Parliament's hard-line opponents to the Russian president's economic reforms called their supporters to arms, and forced a confrontation with the Russian army.

The army, for now still loyal to the popularly elected president, overwhelmed the hard-line militants, and Yeltsin appears once again to have survived efforts by the old rule to reassert communist control.

His tragic victory can hardly be heralded as one of democracy triumphant. But Yelstin can justify his order to put down violent opposition by force. And the West, in any case, has little choice but to continue backing this horse.

The communist hard-liners in Parliament, joined by assorted ultra- nationalists, fascists, royalists, Russian army defectors and Russian Orthodox priests, had formed an ungodly alliance against democracy. Once Vice President Alexander Rutskoi called on Yeltsin's foes to storm Moscow's city government headquarters and the country's main television complex, the president had to resist the armed challenge.

A victory by his opponents would have been a likely victory for totalitarianism in some form. The opposing factions comprising the anti-Yeltsin alliance probably then would have turned on each other, each seeking to establish its own brand of authoritarian control, and Russia might have slipped toward disintegration. At which point the world would be dealing with a nuclear power without a stable government.

So President Clinton and the leaders of other Western nations remain solidly behind Yeltsin's actions. What choice is there, really?

Of course, while Yeltsin's victory forestalls an immediate slide toward totalitarianism, there remains the danger that it could lead, ultimately, down the same dark path. In forcing an armed confrontation, the enemies of democracy have forced Russia to respond to political crisis in its traditional way - not with freewheeling political debate and a fair and open election, but with the crushing use of force.

This time, force was used on the side of those who want to see economic reform and democracy prevail. This time. But the frightening reality illustrated by this weekend's assault on the Russian White House, its parliament building, is that the Russian army retains the power to keep a regime in power - or to oust one. And the army's loyalty is a subject of constant speculation.

It backed Yeltsin yesterday, is backing him today. What about tomorrow?

Then there is the fear that Yeltsin himself, stymied so long by a Soviet-era, hard-line communist parliament, will take so much power into his own hands to accomplish his reforms that the nation will end up with strongman rule.

A possibility. But given the stalemate that Yeltsin faced before he dissolved the parliament, the nation's lack of a democratic tradition, the increasingly violent divisions in its neighboring former Soviet states, and the grave potential for chaos throughout Russia itself, the West has to put its hopes for both stability and democracy in Yeltsin.

Despite this weekend's appalling bloodshed, the United States and its allies are right to offer their continued support - with one eye looking steadily ahead toward the parliamentary elections Yeltsin has promised, and the other fixed warily on the Russian army.

by CNB