"There are two devils," says Grigory Yavlinsky, the democratic reformer presumably running third in the race for president of Russia. "One is a small devil - that is Yeltsin. One is a big devil - that is the Communist Zyuganov."
The 44-year-old free-market economist is explaining the dilemma facing Russian voters as they go to the polls June 16. We are on a telephone line being sloppily tapped by the KGB - a kind of conference call with clicks and sudden drops in volume."All the media here," says Yavlinsky, "on the theory of choosing the lesser of two evils, tell the people `better the small devil.' But they forget that when the small devil overcomes the big devil, he becomes the bigger devil."
Yavlinsky is the victim of media that believe that the only way to preserve their freedom, endangered by a return to communism, is to manipulate the report. By becoming propagandists - building up one candidate, blacking out all the others - almost all Russian national media have been shamelessly committed to breathing new life into Boris Yeltsin.
Polls show the lesser-evil campaign has been working. Yeltsin's support has supposedly grown from single digits to about 20 percent, matching the percentage supposedly achieved by the Communist leader, leaving other candidates in single digits.
A few weeks ago, when he was panicked by the possibility of Gennadi Zyuganov getting a majority on the first ballot, Yeltsin called in Yavlinsky to discuss joining the government with reformist forces.
The reformer was ready to deal. He would support a Yeltsin recommitted to private property and human rights, to ending the war in Chechnya and to firing corrupt ministers.
The Russian president was at first inclined to accept these conditions, but his palace guard was not. His venal handlers promised control of the polling places as well as media domination, and - if Communist Zyuganov still outpolled the ballot-box-stuffing Yeltsinites - a long suspension of the runoff on the pretense that "we wuz robbed."
Evidently Russia's president now believes his own publicity. A few days ago, as Yeltsin dickered with nationalists as well as mafia bankers who wanted a deal with the Communists, Yavlinsky announced that there could be no pre-election coalition between the Kremlin and the reformers.
What should Americans root for?
We cannot be for the Communist. After interviewing Zyuganov, I concluded that he was not the stolid apparatchik and lousy campaigner he was cracked down to be; on the contrary, he is an adroit politician, alert and robust, capable of presenting one face to the West and the opposite on the stump. If Communists win, this Russian election could be the last.
Nor should we root for a Yeltsin triumph. As Yavlinsky says: "After leading Russia down the path of corruption, after killing 60,000 people in Chechnya for nothing - if the people still supported Yeltsin, he would think he's God. There would be no limit to his power."
I'm rooting for a widely split vote on June 16, with even Lebed and Zhirinovsky and Gorbachev cutting into the front-runners and with Yavlinsky's "I Choose Freedom" campaign running strong.
Then, seeing the nationalist and military browns line up behind the Communist reds, Yeltsin would be forced to sign a public contract with the democrats to build his runoff majority. If he then won and did not double-cross, Russia would take the road of reform.
It's a sharp-angled cushion shot, but it's better than rooting only for the devil we know.