Washington -- TWO RUSSIAN leaders now engage our attention. One, because we think we know him well -- but don't. The other, because we do not know him at all -- but soon will.
First, the well-known one, Boris Yeltsin. The predominant view of the Clinton administration is that Mr. Yeltsin is at least close to creating a real democrat, and that our interests are well served by his longevity. He will be in power a long time, they persist in saying.
But behind what seems more and more to be a Potemkin facade, a new Boris Yeltsin is emerging in the eyes of the people who know him best. They increasingly see a man demonized by suspicion, isolated by power pretensions and potentially capable physical violence toward his closest associates. He listens to no one, resents any advice and is, in the eyes of some excellent analysts, creating not a democratic Russia but a kind of "semi-constitutional monarchy," an eerie 1990s version of the old czardoms.
Above all, there is alcohol, disastrously blended with strong drugs for his back problem and his hereditary depressions. Boris Yeltsin, in recent months, his close associates say, has become what Russians call "being badly drunk."
Indeed, Mr. Yeltsin's behavior before and after his trip to the United States last month was so bad -- particularly when he tried drunkenly to lead a band in Berlin and then when he could not get off the plane in Ireland to meet the prime minister -- that a group of his most devoted associates criticized his lack of control in unprecedented letters and interviews. One, Yegor Yakovlev, a former Yeltsin adviser, wrote that "your weakness for liquor is a secret to no one but yourself," and prophesied %J ominously that "the country enters a kind of anonymous rule."
Then there is the second leader who is little-known in the West. General Alexander I. Lebed is closeted away in the unlikely republic of Trans-Dniester, a tiny slip of land between Moldova and Ukraine.
Who is this pugnacious, straight-talking, tough-guy Gen. Lebed, who is favored in surveys by fully two-thirds of the Russian army officer corps to be the next defense minister and who is pushed by many nationalists as a presidential candidate?
When the Soviet Union collapsed -- and with it, not only Soviet communism but also the power and future of the Soviet armed forces -- the youthful General Lebed holed up in Trans-Dniester with the 14th army, which he commands. In that strategic position, he became a figure of raging opposition to fate, holding out against the nothingness that was facing a Russian people who were only yesterday part of an empire. Old communists flocked to temporary exile in Trans-Dniester, where, like White Russians in Paris after 1917, they nourished dreams of a "return."
General Lebed, only 44, is not easy to characterize or to categorize. A former boxer, he is short, blunt, trim, hard-smoking, crafty and more original than most people give him credit for.
For instance, he lauds the now-retired Chilean Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who brought Chile through 14 years of brutal dictatorship but with the prize of a brilliant, modernized economy. He has been quoted as saying that Augusto Pinochet "saved the state from total collapse and put the army in pride of place. The loud mouths were forced, in a brutal manner, to shut their mouths." (Yet, Augusto Pinochet was, during the late '70s and the '80s in Russia the villain of the communists!)
And when asked once under what circumstances he could visualize the military taking over in Russia, General Lebed answered, surprisingly, "If Zhirinovsky took power." Many would put General Lebed and Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, the big-mouth supernationalist, in the same corner; to the contrary, serious military men look with contempt on the man's undisciplined ravings.
The saga of these two men, Mr. Yeltsin and General Lebed became even more interesting last summer.
After General Lebed criticized Boris Yeltsin for weakness and lauded Mr. Pinochet, Mr. Yeltsin moved to replace him through a typically Byzantine old-Russian maneuver: The 14th army would be downsized, and the young and able general would be too senior for it. That was a mistake, because General Lebed fought back bitterly and, with the support of the sulking, angry and humiliated army, won against Mr. Yeltsin and stayed right where he was.
It is a battle that may well augur the future.
Georgie Anne Geyer is a syndicated columnist.