RUSSIA FACES EERIE PERIOD OF STABILITY PROSPECTS RISE, BUT PEOPLE WONDER WHAT IS NEXT.(MAIN)

Byline: STEVEN ERLANGER New York Times

MOSCOW A year ago, President Boris Yeltsin announced that he was preparing a ``September barrage'' against his sworn opposition in the Russian congress. By October, the metaphor had turned real, with tanks shelling the Parliament building.

This August, there is an eerie stability. Monthly inflation is down to 6 percent compared with 26 percent a year ago. Salaries are worth more with the ruble stronger and consumer spending is up. There is consensus on economic policy under Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, who has adopted the tight-money policies he criticized in January. Yeltsin appears more energetic, the new Parliament is behaving itself, and a divided opposition is apparently looking more toward the 1996 elections than to counterrevolution in the streets.

On a trip last week down the Volga River, talking to ordinary Russians, Yeltsin had a new announcement: ``I see that in many regions the economic slide has stopped.''

That is a vast improvement, but how stable is it? Made pessimistic by their tortured history, few Russians like to hazard any bets. The country has been in tumult so long that any extended period without calamity is deeply unsettling.

Opinion polls still show ambivalence about the future, even as the newspapers debate whether the August 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev was an effort to save the country or to strangle it. Among Muscovites, traditionally the most cosmopolitan of Russians, only 30 percent think capitalism will improve their lives and that of their families, while 37 percent still say they don't know. About 23 percent think things will become worse. A year ago, 26 percent expected improvement.

There are enormous problems in Russia, from crime, corruption, and moral disorder, to growing unemployment, unpaid salaries, and intercompany debt. But as Sergei Pavlenko, head of Russia's Center for Economic Reforms, says: ``The high-temperature fever crisis of the Russian economy is over.''

A senior Western finance official put it differently: ``We're happy with Russia now. Why? Because it's not on the precipice anymore. It may get there again, but it's kind of back-burner. It's costing us less in money and less in nerves.''

For lack of a better strategy in an extended period of thin budgets and greater domestic demands, Washington and other Western allies seem simply to be trying to buy Russia time.

Such a policy annoys Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, who fears that Western miserliness and strategic neglect now, in such sharp contrast to the effort made to contain the Soviet Union, may feed political extremism. But Kozyrev agrees that Western aid is far less important than private investment, and that time is precisely what Russia needs.

Time to nurture democratic institutions, like political parties and juries. Time to pass practical laws governing free-market business. Time to learn neweconomic behavior. Time to get over the humiliation of the Soviet Union's collapse and regain some patriotic pride. Time to get rich enough not to feel embarrassed. Time to get used to stability itself.

CAPTION(S):

Associated Press/MISHA JAPARIDZE A RUSSIAN WOMAN CRIES Sunday in Moscow during a service for three victims of the abortive August 1991 coup.