WITH the latest opinion poll showing President Yeltsin trailing 20 percentage points behind the communist candidate, Mr Gennady Zyuganov, and the general commanding the Moscow military district adding his weight to calls for a postponement of June's presidential elections, the political atmosphere in Russia is becoming more tense by the day.
The nationalist, Gen Alexander Lebed, who is a candidate for the presidency, went so far as to tell the Interfax news agency yesterday: "I feel civil war in my bones."
In a poll published yesterday, the awkwardly named Institute for the Sociology of Parliamentarianism, the only group to get its forecasts right in the last two parliamentary elections, showed Mr Zyuganov with 45 per cent support, Mr Yeltsin with 25 per cent, Gen Lebed on 8 per cent, the democratic candidate, Mr Grigory Yavlinsky, on 9 per cent, an eye surgeon, Mr Sviatoslav Fyodoroy, on 3 per cent and the former president, Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, on 2 per cent.
Mr Yeltsin has said that a communist victory would lead to civil war, while a group of leading industrialists, in a now celebrated letter to the Sevodnya newspaper, threatened they had "resources which could be used in the event of the wrong candidate winning on June 16th.
It should be understood, however, that Russian politicians have a remarkable gift for overstatement. Many described the shelling of the Parliament by pro Russian forces in October 1993 as a "civil war" even though life went on as normal in the rest of Moscow, not to mention the rest of the vast Russian Federation.
But the intervention of the military in the debate has undoubtedly increased tensions. First into action was the leading Yeltsin aide, Gen Alexander Korzhakov, a former KGB officer, who in interviews with the Observer and Interfax openly called for a postponement of the election.
Gen Korzhakov has now been joined in the call for postponement by Col Gen Leonty Kuznetsov, who commands the troops in the Moscow region. His support and that of his troops could prove crucial if a state of emergency were declared and the election postponed.
Earlier this year the Boston Globe, quoting senior officials from a number of US intelligence agencies, reported that Gen Korzhakov was head of a group which was prepared to ensure that Mr Yeltsin stayed in power even if it meant postponing the election or rigging its results. Terrorist outrages in Moscow, in the name of Chechen separatists, were cited as one possible reason for cancelling the poll.
So far Mr Yeltsin has consistently stated that the election will go ahead, but his previous expressions of absolute confidence in victory have been replaced by statements that success is "not assured"
On Russian TV a political analyst, Mr Nikolai Petrov, said it was certain that plans to call off the election were among the various strategies being hatched in the Kremlin. The plans were by no means the most likely ones to be implemented, but they were there, he said.
Mr Gorbachev was probably close to the truth yesterday when he said Gen Korzhakov's interviews involved a deliberate ploy to test public opinion on calling off the vote, and the reaction had been so strong that the elections were now likely to go ahead.
This week also has seen a return to old Soviet actions, with the proposed expulsion of nine British diplomats for spying and the actual expulsion of an Estonian diplomat yesterday. Both could help Mr Yeltsin in a climate of increasing anti Western feeling.
