Powerful anti-democratic winds are blowing in Russia as the parliamentary elections approach. If the Clinton Administration keeps on demonizing anti-Yeltsin forces, it could wind up having to deal with much more hostile leaders. If, on the other hand, it reaches out to the hard-liners, it could find moderates to work with. PNS associate editor Andrew Meier, who has lived and worked in the former Soviet Union for the last five years, writes widely on Russian politics.

Democracy has become a dirty word in Russia, but capitalism is still okay. This is the overriding message of the current parliamentary election campaigns. If the Clinton administration fails to see that Russia's painful marriage of democracy and capitalism has hit the rocks, its entire Russia policy could founder.

Just a few years ago, American economists coined the term "democratic markets" to describe the goal of the Russian people's powerful yearning for reform. But what the Russians want is reform pounded out with an iron fist. With the upcoming elections this yearning may well be fulfilled.

How did Russia come to this fork in the road? Although privatization, price liberalization and mobile phones are transforming Russia's economy by themselves they have failed to further market democracy. On the contrary, they have helped spawn an elite managerial class -- perhaps ten percent of the population. Fat cats who now control newly privatized state enterprises, they have been the country's biggest roadblock preventing Russian people from coming to understand and appreciate democratic values.

The last thing these so-called "New Russians" want is neither a democratic reformer nor a populist law-and-order enforcer both of whom will challenge their ill-gotten gains and throw them in jail. With their dachas, Range Rovers and European bank accounts, they have staked their future on raw capitalism, not in sharing their wealth with the masses suffering at the bottom. They'll vote for the status quo, which means Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin's "Our Home is Russia" bloc.

Unfortunately for Chernomyrdin -- and the West -- the pro-capitalist New Russians are in the minority. Last week in Moscow, the Duma Speaker and Yeltsin ally Ivan Rybkin predicted that none of the democratic parties will get the five percent of the vote needed for seats in the parliament. Instead, broad sectors of Russian society now seem set to reject both capitalism and democracy in favor of the forces of the past -- the resuscitated Communists, the nationalist "Congress of Russian Communities," and the anti-private-property Agrarians. The liberal, reformist Yabloko party leader Grigory Yavlinsky, meanwhile, adored by the White House and Harvard, is favored by only a minority of Russia's voters.

Knowing that a victory by the Communists and their allies would only speed his political demise, Yeltsin and his backers are desperately considering canceling the parliamentary elections or at least lowering the five-percent barrier so as to dilute the Communist victory. Some observers believe Washington may be quietly encouraging the effort. "The administration would never say it on the record," says Michael McFaul, an expert on Russian politics at Stanford, "but some of them wouldn't mind if Yeltsin could cancel this vote."

But destroying democracy to save it would be a dangerous move. The elections mark a tremendous turning point for Russian democratic institution building. As McFaul notes, "Russia hasn't had consecutive national elections in the thousand year history of the place." McFaul holds it's time for Washington to reach out to this range of conservative parties who are gaining popularity among both old and young, skilled and unskilled. He doesn't agree with Yeltsin's view that such a move would dash hope for reform in Russia.

Indeed, not all the opposition fits the Red-Brown (Communist-Fascist) caricature Washington has constructed for it -- an alliance of anti-Semitic, anti-Western, nationalist imperialists dying to turn the clock back. The election field is crowded with 43 blocs on the ballot, ranging from the "Women of Russia" to the "Beer Lovers' Party." In the left-centrist opposition there are leaders who have espoused moderation, even offering glimmers of enlightened thought, among them the Communist Gennady Zyuganov, the militarist retired Lt. Gen. Alexander Lebed and the self-described "nationalist-democrat," industrialist Yuri Skokov.

American investors in Russia are on the right track. A few weeks ago they met with Communist Zyuganov at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Moscow, eliciting a promise that his party would not "impose a monopoly on the truth, power or property." At the same time he argued that the state should continue to monopolize energy, transportation, communications and the military industrial complex.

There are, of course, far more dangerous contenders for the Russian throne. On the extreme right there are the bitter anti-reformers and hard-bitten nationalists whom the U.S. now shuns. Should they return to power in Moscow, the distant continent will grow more authoritarian and gloomy. And the U.S. will have to assume a good part of the blame for squandering a historic opportunity to befriend an old enemy, move away from rivalry to cooperation at the government level, and -- most of all -- ease the end-of-the-millennium burden of the Russian people.

The window is closing fast. The lost hope for democracy in Russia won't be just a failure of financial investment, of Western money down the Russian drain, but of vision -- an stubborn inability to see the world in anything but our own values and terms.