President Clinton should urgently add a new official to his national security staff - a clergyman whose full-time job would be to pray for the health of Boris Yeltsin.
It now appears that Yeltsin - 62, overweight and with a drinking problem - is all that stands between Russia and rule by a fascist dictator.Under Russia's new constitution, adopted by referendum Dec. 12, if Yeltsin were to die, a presidential election would be held within three months.
Few experts in Russia doubt that the powerful office would be captured by the ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whose extremist party came in first, winning one in four votes in parliamentary elections. Also, Communists and their allies did well.
When final results are known, they will show that less than half the electorate backed Yeltsin and the reformists who are trying to implant democracy and a market economy.
In an effort to improve his frightening image, Zhirinovsky, 47, held a news conference (bizarrely dressed in a tuxedo) and said, "I am not a fascist."
Oh?
By his own copious words, Zhirinovsky is a racist, bigot, xenophobe, Slavophile, militarist, imperialist and paranoid. If he technically isn't a fascist, as Yeltsin's aides claim, he's still a menace.
Among those he detests are darker-skinned people, Jews, Westerners, Americans, Balts and businessmen. Those he speaks well of are German neo-Nazis, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Libya's Moammar Gadhafi and the Serbs ("our Orthodox brethren") rampaging through Bosnia.
His recent autobiography reminds one of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf." Both reveal sick minds and vast territorial ambitions. Zhirinovsky calls for a "final march south," which would put the Russian army on "the shores of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea."
To accomplish these goals, Zhirinovsky's troops would have to move merely through Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece.
He has mixed feelings about Germany. In one breath, he threatens it with 100 atomic bombs if it "meddles" in Russia. In another, he offers to partition Poland, Ukraine and the Baltics with Germany.
Some sample quotations:
"I'll start by squeezing the Baltics and other small nations. I'm not going to invade them or anything. I'll bury radioactive waste along the Lithuanian border and put up powerful fans and blow the stuff across the border at night. They'll all get radiation sickness. They'll die of it. . . .
"I say it quite plainly: When I come to power, there will be a dictatorship. There's nothing like fear to make people work better. The stick, not the carrot. I'll do it all without tanks on the streets. Those who have to be arrested will be arrested quietly at night. I may have to shoot 100,000 people, but the other 300 million will live peacefully. I have the right to shoot these 100,000. I have this right as president."
Twice since August 1991, the military has saved Yeltsin and Russia's fragile, flawed democracy from coup and insurrection by hard-line Communist reactionaries.
Would the army do so again? Its officers are impoverished by inflation, humiliated by the loss of empire and respect, furious at their pigsty-like housing.
At key barracks in and around Moscow, the ones that would be called upon to defend the Yeltsin government, 80 percent of their vote went to the raving Zhirinovsky.