Only a few weeks ago, Russia was one of the most downtrodden and detested countries in the eyes of Washington's elite. One could not utter the word "Russia" without adding adjectives such as "crime- ridden," "collapsing" or "corrupt." Russia was considered a basket case of a country that had failed at capitalism and democracy and was soon to fail as a state. Russia's reputation in the United States was so bad that Russian businesspeople began courting American public relations firms to help rectify Russia's image.

With the United States fixated on crime and corruption in Russia, Russians obsess about two other dramas: upcoming parliamentary elections and the war in the Caucasus region. The first drama might well have a happy ending, rare for Russian dramas these days. The second is almost certainly a tragedy in the making. Worse, the war in the Caucasus may eventually subsume elections altogether, resulting in their cancellation, civil resistance and even civil war. Before such a scenario gains more momentum, U.S. officials should look beyond Russian corruption and do what they can to lower the probability of democratic collapse in Russia.

According to conventional wisdom, the United States "lost" Russia in the 1990s. This

assessment can be found on the pages of The Nation, The Washington Times, The New

York Times magazine, or foreign policy issue papers prepared for presidential candidate

George W. Bush. These attacks fall into two contradictory categories. One school holds

that the policies pursued by the United States over the last decade have failed to establish capitalism and democracy in Russia, and instead have fueled corruption, crime, and ill will towards the United States. The other school argues that the United States was wrong to try to engineer domestic change within Russia in the first place.

To the Editor:

You quote President Clinton as saying that ''Russia and China, where the shackles of state socialism once choked off enterprise, are moving to join the thriving community of free democracies'' (news article, May 19). Both are moving to join the community of market economies, but only Russia has taken steps to become a free democracy.

Although flawed in many ways, Russia is an electoral democracy. China is an authoritarian regime. In Russia, leaders are elected, people can assemble, worship and travel freely, and the press can criticize the Government. In China, none of these freedoms exist.

Perhaps Mr. Clinton made a slip of the tongue. But for those who worry that he too often ignores violations of democratic rights in pursuit of market opportunities, this did not look so innocent.

From both the right and the left, critics of U.S. policy toward Russia have had a heyday in recent weeks asserting that the Clinton administration got Russia wrong. The refrains are by now familiar: "Clinton became too close to Yeltsin." "The IMF was naive." "The West funded crony capitalism." "Russians are not culturally predisposed to markets," etc. The policy conclusion from these observations is that the United States neither can nor should do anything more to aid Russia but instead should reconstruct a firewall around this basket case of a country and try once again to contain the Russian threat to markets and democracy around the world.

Not since the August 1991 coup attempt has the future of Russian democracy been more uncertain than it is today. Ironically, at a time when Russian society has embraced individual liberties, a free press and competitive elections, the new leader of the Russian state, Acting President Vladimir Putin, has demonstrated real ambivalence toward democracy.

The second error of omission is a failure to acknowledge the real menu of choices foreign policymakers face, especially when dealing with a revolution in midstream such as Russia's in the '90s. The same Mikhail Gorbachev who let the Warsaw Pact fall apart and helped Germany reunite also let his government loot Soviet gold reserves and allowed his armed forces to kill innocent people in Georgia and the Baltic states. Was [George W. Bush] wrong to deal with such a leader? The same Boris Yeltsin who bombed his parliament in 1993, invaded Chechnya twice and allowed corruption to flourish also destroyed the Soviet empire, introduced markets and democracy to Russia, destroyed thousands of nuclear weapons, acquiesced to NATO expansion and cooperated with the United States to end the Kosovo war.

Russia's state media openly championed the benefits of a George W. Bush victory for Russia. Under Bush, so [Putin]'s people believe, the United States will no longer care about domestic politics in Russia, such as human rights, independent media or the war in Chechnya. With Bush in power, so the thinking goes in Moscow, the Kremlin will have a free hand to roll back democracy in the name of restoring law and order.

Obviously, Putin and his people have a cartoonized understanding of the new Bush administration's foreign policy philosophy, a crude reading of how foreign policy is made in the United States and a flawed historical reading of Nixon's policy toward the Soviet Union. It is not the job of the new Bush team to give history lessons or civics courses about the U.S. policy process to its Russian counterpart. But it is imperative that the new Bush foreign policy team signal clearly and immediately to Moscow its true intentions regarding Russia, which above all else should reflect no nostalgia for the "good old days" of the Cold War era.

The Bush administration cannot interfere in the ownership of a Russian company. Nor can it save independent media in Russia or democracy more generally. Ultimately, only the Russian people can prevent dictatorship from reemerging. The Bush administration can, however, signal clearly and loudly that it sides with the majority of Russians and the brave NTV journalists. Silence only confirms what many of those holed up in the NTV offices already believe: that the new American administration does not care about Russian democracy. Even if these Russians lose their battle to maintain a free and independent media, the Bush administration should position itself on the right side of history in this struggle.