Zyuganov

MOSCOW -- Vladimir V. Putin won an outright victory today in Russia's presidential elections, avoiding a runoff even as his opponents charged widespread fraud after long delays in the vote count. At 10 a.m. today, with 94.08 percent of the vote counted, Putin had been credited with 52.57 percent, enough to claim election as Russia's second president. Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist leader, made a strong showing for second place, with 29.45 percent. The liberal Grigory Yavlinsky did much worse than he expected, at 5.85 percent.

PARIS -- An optimist would say that all went remarkably well in the first round of the Russian presidential election. Boris Yeltsin's pretensions and excesses were punished by a drop in support and a narrow escape from defeat.Gennady Zyuganov's relative success motivates Mr. Yeltsin's supporters to turn out in July to vote in the second round of the election.Gen. Alexander Lebed's unpredicted success and his willingness to support Mr. Yeltsin in the second round imply a guarantee that Mr. Yeltsin will be kept to the reform road.

MOSCOW -- After boasting on election night that he had gotten through the campaign without making any promises, President-elect Vladimir V. Putin said yesterday that the government needs to improve Russia's standard of living -- but then quickly caught himself. Don't expect miracles, he told his countrymen, and don't expect anything soon. Great flurries of political speculation were wafting across Moscow yesterday, but just as with the snow that has been falling off and on the past few days, nothing has been sticking.

WHEN RUSSIAN voters go to the polls this Sunday to elect their new president, they can choose from among 11 candidates. But only two, the incumbent Boris Yeltsin and Gennady Zyuganov, the communist candidate, count. And they offer the voters a fundamental choice.If Mr. Yeltsin wins re-election, Russia's experiment in crafting a post-communist society roughly modeled after western democracies will continue. Should Mr. Zyuganov win, the country would face political and economic uncertainty as his communists attempt to undo many of the market reforms.

MOSCOW -- Behind the genial, bland Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist front-runner in Russia's presidential race, stands a steely adviser with an unflinching gaze, whose eyes are fixed firmly on the past.Anatoly I. Lukyanov is the eminence grise of today's Russian Communist Party, the figure cloaked in shadows who quietly wields influence over Mr. Zyuganov. They are the two faces of the resurgent party and send contradictory messages to the rest of the world, so that no one is sure which face is the real one.Mr.

MOSCOW -- Russia's man of the hour, Gennady Zyuganov, is not a person with a distinctive tic. There is no Brezhnev beetle-brow, none of the large gestures of a Khrushchev, nothing of Boris N. Yeltsin's bonhomie.Mr. Zyuganov, the politician who engineered the triumph of the Communist Party in this week's parliamentary elections, would blend right into one of the grainy, Soviet-era photos of the Politburo -- one of those inscrutable faces in the long, gray line of party apparatchiki.But what he lacks in personality, he apparently makes up for in crafty politics.

The worst possible president of Russia, for Americans, would be Zyuganov the Communist. The best would be Gorbachev the Communist. Israel will eventually make peace with Lebanon, if it's left. Bill realizes that Kim Jong Il can cast the deciding vote in our election. B. Bonilla is a most unlikely designated grouch. Pub Date: 4/17/96

MOSCOW -- Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov has made some far-fetched claims on the stump. In recent weeks, he suggested that Josef Stalin respected the Russian Orthodox Church in his heart. He also said that the Russian mass media are conspiring against him.On at least the second claim, he has a point.Mr. Zyuganov was making his first campaign tour as a presidential candidate in southern Siberia, giving detailed news conferences and long, impassioned speeches in factories, farms and town halls.

PARIS -- Appropriately enough, for a society formed in Marxism, Russia this week will experience the climax of a class struggle.The important classes in post-perestroika Russia are not the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. They are the old apparatus accustomed to run the country under communism, and the new ''capitalists'' -- those former members of the Communist apparatus adroit enough to have appropriated large chunks of the country's resources, calling it privatization.The West calls the two groups the Communists and the reformers.

THE ODDS SEEM suicidal. If presidential elections were to be held today, Boris N. Yeltsin could count on seven percent of the vote, according to opinion polls. Can he recoup before the June 16 vote?In announcing that he is a candidate for re-election, Mr. Yeltsin clearly thinks so. Even as January data show Russia's economy shrank, unemployment rose and average wages fell, the country's first post-communist president believes he can overcome all the criticism and grumbling. "My duty as the politician who launched reforms is to consolidate all healthy forces and prevent shocks that could lead to a civil war," he declared on the stump in Yekaterinburg, his one-time Urals hometown.