Why is Boris Yeltsin Kvetching? Analysis Last week the Russian bear began to growl in earnest and it wasn't only a poor rating at the polls that was giving him indigestion. Yeltsin, the presumed supporter of democracy and "openness" -- inherited in part from his precursor Gorbachev -- has been kvetching loudly against the West and NATO. At a Duma (lower house) meeting, he has even warned of the possibility of world war. The news justifiably causes ripples of alarm among the nations of the Western alliance. Wasn't Sarajevo in 1914 the spark that ignited World War I? That year, a Serb threw the bomb that motivated Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia, which led to a face-off of coalition nations, and also led, incidentally, to the formation of Yugoslavia. Will Yugoslavia now take the world down? The White House doesn't think so. Nor perhaps does Yelsin, who's kvetching because his impeachment process is under way, because his ulcer hurts, or because nobody likes him. He is accused by his foes of the "illegal" breakup of the Soviet Union, of an "illegal" crackdown in Chechnya, of corruption, and absenteeism. The counter-revolutionaries in Russia, if they can rightly be called that, have found a sacrificial victim and they mean to complete the ritual. The ritual involves a nostalgic look at a past when Russia had an identity in the modern world, even only a totalitarian one, and when kvetching on the U.N. rostrum was soup du jour. Instead, Russia is now welshing on its internal debts, devaluating its money, and generally, splitting at the seams. Number two man in Russia, Prime Minister Primakov's star is in the ascendant. Yeltsin begrudgingly admits that he's "useful," according to reports. Primakov's popularity rating soars above that of Yeltsin and his anti-Western stance tends to give import to Yeltsin's warnings to the West. But do Russians really blame the U.S. and NATO for their plight? Russia has always been a mute, monolithic mass and continues in some respects to be one. According to some historians it is a country that has never developed a pluralistic society, not even a civil society, where progress can be accomplished without the threat of fear or political reprisals. Yelsin uses fear perhaps to ward personal political reprisals for having failed personally. His rumblings might only be wails of impotence. A question remains, however: Does Russia feel a real duty to Serbia? True, the Russians fought alongside the Serb partisans during World War II, but for all the years the communist dictator Tito was in power in Yugoslavia, they bitterly swallowed their displeasure with him. Now that Milosovec has come to power, do they like him better? In a sense, Yugoslavia, like Russia, is a power patched together in the aftermath of two world wars, and crumbling without a world war to paste its internal institutions together. This indeed seems to present a threat and a warning to the societies of the West. April 20, 1999