NEVER A MAN FOR SELF-EFFACEMENT, BORIS YELTSIN concluded last week's signing of the START II treaty by pronouncing it the "document of the century." He then seized the hand of George ("my friend") Bush and began squeezing as if he were trying to wring out a wet dishrag. The gesture was an appropriate one: increasingly beleaguered by a devilish array of domestic problems, the Russian President must twist every drop of prestige he can from his foreign triumphs. Yet not even the acclaim of history's most extensive cutback in nuclear missiles could compensate for an economy tailspinning into chaos. According to...
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