Two camps have appeared within the Russian leadership on the war in Chechnya. The Russian general in charge in Chechnya says he's assaulting the capital city of Grozny tomorrow. The National Security Chief, Alexander Lebed, says a cease fire is in force. President Yeltsin remains silent on the topic. After a background report, two experts discuss Yeltsin's grip on power, the state of the war and the battles within the Kremlin.

MS. FARNSWORTH: We get two views now. Adrian Karatnycky is president of Freedom House, an organization promoting democracy around the world. Leon Aron, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is completing a biography of President Yeltsin. Thank you for being with us. This is very confusing, Mr. Aron. We have Alexander Lebed, who's apparently negotiated at least an agreement to have a cease-fire and yet all during this day, refugees have been pouring out because the Russian interior troops and army troops have told them to, because an offensive is coming. What are we to make of it?

LEON ARON, Yeltsin Biographer: Well, I think there hasn't been a directive from the top by Yeltsin. He, I think, let his lieutenants fight it out for a while, so that he could then ride in, set everything to order, and finalize the strategy. So if this cease-fire holds, Lebed's apparently overrode the order by General Pulikovsky to storm the city within hours. If it holds, I think to me it's an indication that Yeltsin eventually sided, if tacitly, with Lebed and began to pursue the peace track, rather than the military track.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Is that how you see it?

ADRIAN KARATNYCKY, Freedom House: Well, I think there's something very interesting that's going on here. Gen. Pulikovsky, who is on that introductory clip, is answerable to the interior minister. He commands the interior ministry troops.

MS. FARNSWORTH: And we said wrongly he was an army commander--

MR. KARATNYCKY: That's right.

MS. FARNSWORTH: --but he's in interior.

MR. KARATNYCKY: But he was temporarily acting as the commander of all the forces there because the army guy was on a holiday. The army general, Gen. Tikamirov, was the number two man to Gen. Lebed when Gen. Lebed served in Muldova. And he as the army chief of command is answerable to the defense minister, who is the man that Lebed appointed. So now it is clear that Lebed has greater both personal influence over the top, local commander, and through a chain of command the defense minister has greater influence. So there is the chance that Lebed, at least temporarily, can enforce some order of discipline.

MS. FARNSWORTH: But you don't expect the military commanders to disobey this?

MR. KARATNYCKY: Well, I don't expect the army commander to disobey this, but what the interior troops do may be to provoke a gun fight that necessitates a broadening of warfare or requires the breaking of a cease-fire. That's something that's not controllable. In fact, I think it raises the broader question about how Russia is governed or misgoverned, which is to say that it's all personalized. There is not a verystrict chain of command. There was a kind of a collapse under Gen. Grachev, who relied on personal favorites to exercise will--his will and the chain of command, and Yeltsin actually preferred it. It's a kind of--if you look at the way the troops are there, it's a total muddle. One third are answerable to the interior ministry. Two thirds are answerable to the army. They don't seem to be cooperating between themselves. Sometimes local leaders are improvising policy, and they don't seem to be under effective civilian control. And Gen. Lebed, who used to be a military man, is now in a semi-civilian role, is trying to establish, in effect, civilian control.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Okay. Let's get the broader picture for a minute. I want to go back to something you said. You said, Mr. Aron, that you think this has been partly orchestrated by President Yeltsin. You didn't use that word. Is that what you mean? You don't think he's just very ill and out of it and that's why this is happening?

MR. ARON: Well, let me put it this way. From everything we know about Yeltsin, he will really have to be on his death bed not to control that particular area of policy making. Yes, the economy is run by Chubais, foreign policy, at least where it does not hinge on security directly, is run by Yevgeny Primakov, the foreign minister. But this is one area where its troops, men, firing guns, where I think Yeltsin would reserve the ultimate word for himself. And I think what has been happening here is that essentially a two track policy is pursued, and Yeltsin kept distance from either part. Neither of those tracks was endorsed by him. And if you look at it--

MS. FARNSWORTH: And by two track, you mean there have been negotiations and--

MR. ARON: Talk and bomb. Something that's familiar from, from other conflicts, including the Vietnam War. But Yeltsin has not committed himself to either track. Variously he stresses one or the other, but I think it's--it's ultimately a game that he probably cannot lose because he, in essence, told both Pulikovsky and Lebed, you can have your way, see who does it better, you want to have a military solution, go ahead, try to storm Grozny; you want to have a peace solution, fine, we'll see how that works out, how you work it out between yourselves. Then at the last moment, I think Yeltsin will emerge and, in fact, I could make a prediction that if, indeed, this cease-fire holds, we will see Yeltsin emerging within the next couple of days simply because he's not going to let Lebed become the peace-maker. If there's going to be a peace-maker, it's going to be Boris Yeltsin.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Well, under this analysis, what do you make of the directive that Alexander Lebed said did not come from the President, even though it had been signed, apparently, by President Yeltsin, it was a facsimile of his signature?

MR. ARON: Right. Right. Well, Yeltsin--

MS. FARNSWORTH: I mean--

MR. ARON: I mean, there is no doubt that Yeltsin is in a sort of funk stage. I mean, he goes through peaks and valleys. I think it's a psychological rather than physical condition. He tends to draw back after major victories or exertions. And I don't doubt that in this sort of valley stage of his, of his disease, or shall we say illness, he does not follow things in detail. But what I--and that order may, in fact, have been masterminded by somebody else which he signed.

MS. FARNSWORTH: And this was order that was read to be promoting an attack on Grozny?

MR. ARON: That's right promoting--it was interpreted as promoting an attack. It was actually a very ambivalently worded order. But what I would insist on is that Yeltsin keeps the very basic big picture in mind and certainly if he feels that there is a chance, look, Russia wants to get out of that war, there's no doubt, but it also does not want to be defeated, if not victory, then some face-saving device. And so Yeltsin I think at this point is waiting to see which road to a face-saving device, a face-saving victory, or at least some sort of stabilization of the situation is more preferable, the military or through peace negotiations. And at various times, there were various stresses, and emphasis.

MS. FARNSWORTH: This is quite different from what some of the press reports say which indicate that he's very, very ill, and in the vacuum this disagreement has, has grown up. What do you think?

MR. KARATNYCKY: I tend to agree and mildly disagree--while I agree with him on certain points--I really do think that there is an issue of Yeltsin's health. He's only had one authentically public appearance in the last eight weeks. That was a brief appearance at his inauguration which was not controlled, which was not behind closed doors, which was not where they control the cameras. Even when he voted in the second round of the elections, they changed the venue and only had an official camera, and it was a very brief period. The fact that he has very little stamina, his protected absence, the way he looks even on those brief periods where he presumably is at the peak of his efficiency and health suggest that this is a very serious and debilitating illness and really call into question the entire style of how Yeltsin has governed. Yeltsin has traditionally governed by putting in several factions, none of which he fully agrees with and balancing them off, he's had democratic reformers, he's had these more sort of hard-line security types, he has had Chernomyrdin and the nomenclatura bureaucrats, and he constantly keeps shifting among them, and the rivalries are played out among each other while he emerges as the final arbiter. Now this system breaks down when he is just physically not up to the task of adjudicating these various sort of, you know, feudal lords who are feuding now among themselves.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Well, is the feuding really about succession?

MR. KARATNYCKY: Well--

MS. FARNSWORTH: More than about--is Chechnya not a pawn?

MR. KARATNYCKY: Chechnya, I believe, has become an issue in the potential succession. I believe that people in Yeltsin's inner circle wanted Lebed to take on this issue and to fail so that he could be removed in the event of a deterioration of Yeltsin's health from the presidential stakes. They believe that this is a kind of a, you know, a kind of Bermuda Triangle, where political careers vanish and disappear. And they believe that he could disappear as a political factor if he comes back with a total failure. And it's not to be excluded that the interplay between trying to undermine his negotiations through this threat of an all out attack was part of this succession game. And if there is this kind of a succession game aimed at discrediting Yeltsin by Chernomyrdin, Chubais, and others who fear his personal popularity, it to me suggests that Yeltsin's health really is in pretty bad shape.

MS. FARNSWORTH: You don't think so?

MR. ARON: Well, no, no, no. In fact, I'm grateful for the opportunity to clarify things. I don't think that Yeltsin is sort of secretly hiding and some sort of dodger hunting wolves, and, you know, singing songs. He is very sick. You know, he had heart conditions for a long time, and he is in general prone to this, all those manic depressive cycles. So he's definitely at the lower stage of his, of his functioning. But I also think that unless he's totally debilitated, things of such importance as to, you know, whether war or peace, whether to storm Grozny and lose another 10,000 men, that is within his purview, unless he is--he is totally incapacitated.

MS. FARNSWORTH: What about the broader picture, Mr. Aron, this is looking at just the war, itself? Here is a situation where the Russian military, which was considered what, the second strongest in the world until recently, has been defeated in Grozny by several thousand rebels.

MR. ARON: Well, you know, Napoleon used to say that, that only a quarter of military strength is military strength, the rest is in morale, and that is, that is what the Russian troops are lacking. Many of them--most of them, in fact, are draftees who can't care less, who are totally incapable, and they're fighting a hardened guerrilla force generally older than they are, plus you have to remember that the Chechens naturally for generations and hundreds of years have been a very war-like people where in order to be a man you have to carry a weapon. This is--I mean, they're truly mountain type of warriors, so things are totally unequal there.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Very briefly, what should the U.S. be doing? What should Washington do?

MR. KARATNYCKY: Well, I think--my sense is that the battle between the hard-line Communists and the ultra nationalists versus this establishment that now governs Russia is over for the foreseeable future. And what we're really talking about is a factional dispute about how to resolve a policy in a part of Russia between people who are from U.S. policy interests not fundamentally different. Whether Lebed becomes the next president or Chernomyrdin, I don't think we would see a radically anti-American, an anti-Western policy that would be very different if either of them won. So I think that this idea of walking on tiptoes gingerly not to influence or not to undermine Yeltsin is not an issue. What we should be doing is speaking very forthrightly. Today the International Monetary Fund transferred another traunch of money, 300 plus million dollars, as part of this $10 billion aid package. We shouldn't be doing those kinds of things. We should be influencing international institutions, letting the Russians know that there is a price to be paid if all out carnage breaks, speaking very forthrightly and not being worried about de-stabilizing Yeltsin. We will stabilize a good Yeltsin and a good Russia by being tough.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Well, thank you both very much.