WORSE IS YET TO COME

THE WHOLE business has the air of the cavalry galloping in, pennants fluttering, to join a fight that is almost over, on a field strewn with corpses. Bill Clinton jets in to Moscow on Tuesday with his army of spin- medics, policy wonks and whiners from the White House press corps, with a set of hastily redrafted battle instructions.

Discussions about stalled arms-control agreements, routine moaning about Russian nuclear technology sales to Iran, polite chiding over Moscow's sympathetic approach to Baghdad, patient explanations of the (suspect) logic of Nato expansion - all of this now matters little. Russia's meltdown, which prompted Boris Yeltsin to fire his entire government last Sunday, has changed everything.

Mr Clinton's new agenda contains two principal, and pressing, items. One is an urgent plea to urge Russia not to revert to command economics, but to persevere with its so far largely failed attempts to rebuild the dead-weight legacy of the Soviet system into something resembling a Western- style economy. The other is a warning: if you don't take this path, don't expect any more money out of us. Waffle about not interfering in the politics of another sovereign power does not apply to Washington when faced with the prospect of the fruits of its Russian policy withering on the vine.

The social scene confronting the US President is clear and grim enough (although, it must be said, not yet one of overwhelming panic). Story after story surfaced last week as the impact of failing banks, tottering under a sea of debt, and a nose-diving rouble filtered through to street level.

Gold and jewellery sales rocketed nearly threefold as Russians rushed to get rid of their currency; the supply of imported medicines dried up as pharmacies could not get hold of the dollars to pay for them. And, all week, the sad-looking queues outside banks continued. The situation will worsen, for sure; predictions of hyper-inflation and winter food shortages abound.

But the contours of the political environment in which Mr Clinton finds himself are less easy to discern. The man the US President will concentrate on is not a jaded and weary Mr Yeltsin - who, despite his robust refusal to resign, seems destined to fade into the background. Viktor Chernomyrdin, the 60-year-old premier designate, is the figure who now counts.

The West has being doing its best to advertise its fears about the possibility that Mr Chernomyrdin will lead Russia on a backward path. On Friday, the US Deputy Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers, said that the $23bn international bail-out deal, brokered by the International Monetary Fund in July, will have now to be renegotiated. It required "a new set of understandings, appropriate to current circumstances, about Russian policy actions".

The IMF was still more specific. Its managing director, Michel Camdessus, told Mr Chernomyrdin on Wednesday that he could forget any international support if Russia returned to the price and trade controls of Soviet days.

Part of the reason for such alarm is the departure of the standard-bearers of Western economic ideology - the "young wolves" Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov. But the West's fears have also been stoked by remarks by Mr Chernomyrdin himself, who criticised the monetarist creed of the West as inadequate for Russia's problems.

There have also been signs that he may cave in to demands for Soviet- style remedies from parliament. Yesterday he sought to repair the damage. "We have already joined the world economy," he said on national television. "There will be no return to the past."

But the proof of that is awaited. Mr Clinton will want more assurances and more information. Yesterday negotiations continued between the government, the Kremlin and the Communist-dominated parliament over Mr Chernomyrdin's confirmation in his new/old post.

The Americans will be eager to establish if any concessions have been made to secure the vote, and whether they have any real force. Among the issues also under negotiation during this haggling is a list of demands drawn up by a government-parliament commission.

According to the Russian media, these include clauses that will chill the heart of the visiting champions of capitalism: fixed prices, renationalisation, printing money. The reformist Izvestia newspaper yesterday called it "suicidal".

The uncertainty over which way Russia will now go marks the onset of a new and tense phase in US-Russian relations. It will, as ever, be characterised as a blend of economics and ideology - a battle by the West to preserve Russia's "reforms" and, if possible, to establish a measure of democracy while it's about it.

But Russia's economy is small; the issue is as much to do with geopolitics. What the United States ultimately fears, as the struggle for Russia's soul gathers pace, is that it will become an increasingly impoverished rogue nation, with weakening control of its mighty stockpiles of weapons and nuclear materials, and a growing fondness for throwing its (admittedly much diminished) weight around in sensitive areas - the Caspian oil fields, Iran, Iraq, Serbia.

All may not yet be lost, but the signs are scarcely rosy. Certainly Mr Chernomyrdin is not the knee-jerk Soviet manager that he is sometimes made out to be in the West. His instincts have tended towards market economics, although they are above all pragmatic. He does, however, suffer from a heavy dose of cronyism and a tendency to indecision.

And there are plenty of cronies about, notably his heavyweight chums in the energy lobby (he used to run the gas giant Gazprom). These include the banking and media barons, such as Boris Berezovsky, Mr Chernomyrdin's chief sponsor, a capitalist entrepreneur whose main priority is creating an environment in which he and his fellow oligarchs can get richer.

But Mr Chernomyrdin's track record of actually implementing "reforms" is not impressive: he failed during his previous six-year premiership to secure a tax code or a workable legal framework in which business could operate.

The absence of both has done much to impede change and to deepen the criminalisation of the entire economy. Perhaps he has genuinely lost faith in market economics as Russia's sole remedy.

Ominously - from the West's viewpoint - the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, has appeared at Mr Chernomyrdin's side in the last few days. The city boss is an ardent interventionist; yesterday he announced, with relish, that Russia's crisis was the "the devastating finale" of monetarism. Whatever, the economic crisis in Russia may soon gather such momentum that no remedy, be it Soviet or monetarist, will help.

Mr Clinton cannot stop the onset of winter among a population that must now pay more for its food, but has less to spend; a population that has grown heartily sick of listening to one economic theory after another without ever seeing the benefit. The Clinton cavalry could indeed be too late.