FINANCIAL TURMOIL AWAITS RUSSIA'S WINNER.

Byline: Alessandra Stanley The New York Times

Russian voters will make a distinct and fateful choice in today's presidential election, but the economic and social problems that will surface after they cast their ballots will bedevil the government no matter who wins.

Even if President Boris Yeltsin wins re-election, his government will have little time for rejoicing. Tax revenues are dangerously low, while government spending throughout the campaign was feverish and unaccounted for.

Just as the bills come due, a new, as yet unappointed administration will face critical choices about revenue, investment and spending at a time when its opposition will be most intent on testing its powers.

Critics of the Yeltsin administration are predicting a major investment and budget crisis in the fall even if he wins. Some of the president's own experts are saying it is already at hand.

``I think these forecasts will be proven wrong,'' Yevgeny Yasin, the economics minister, said last week. ``I did not say that we will not have a budget crisis. Simply, we already have it now.''

Russia may be building up to an awful letdown after the polls close. Beyond the gaping budget deficit, economists all seem to agree that some kind of collapse of the teetering banking industry is imminent.

The economic consequences of an expanding federal debt and financial instability are bad enough. The political reaction to a worsening economy could be even worse.

In the past six months, as the administration was spending recklessly to try to live up to its promises to raise pensions, ease tax burdens on ailing industries and pay long-delayed salaries, production fell even lower than expected, and so did tax revenues.

Inflation grew, and the federal deficit as a percentage of the gross domestic product in April tipped over 9 percent.

``Russia's revenue performance in May and June was historically the worst for the whole reform period,'' said Jochen Wermuth, head of the Finance Ministry's economic expert group.

Even Tuesday, when the campaign was officially closed and electioneering forbidden, the Yeltsin team sneaked in some last-minute budget-straining decrees.

As an ailing Yeltsin stayed secluded in his dacha, his chief economic adviser, Alexander Livshits, announced that the president would lower the age limit of citizens entitled to compensation for savings in state banks that were wiped out by inflation in 1991 and 1992. Livishits said the age limit will be drop to 75 years, down from the present cutoff of 80.

The Itar-Tass news agency reported Tuesday that the president had also sent 250 servicemen and officers who had been wounded in Chechnya for a two-week, all-expenses-paid recuperative holiday in a four-star hotel in the Spanish resort town of Malaga. Officers were permitted to take their wives.

``The truth is that politics is a cocktail of economics and populism,'' said Pavel Bunich, an economist and member of Parliament from the pro-government party, Our Home Is Russia. ``We cannot simply conduct life according to a textbook. We are dealing with lives. Somehow the idea of catering to human needs has been criticized as weak or populist.''

If the Communist presidential candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, is elected, his priorities are clear, even if the most drastic consequences are not. The Communists are opposed to a tight, anti-inflationary monetary policy and expect to print money to spend their way out of industrial and agricultural decline.

Zyuganov says he might form a coalition government, a hint that the most drastic items on the Communist agenda, like renationalization of industry, could wait. Then again, he might not agree to a coalition.

If Yeltsin remains president, he says he will continue the course of economic reform. But he will also have to govern a country where millions of voters have vehemently rejected this course, and where Parliament is controlled by Communists.

His advisers could change and his priorities shift to a more middle-of-the-road policy, seeking to soften the more painful aspects of economic liberalization with more social spending and subsidies to industry.

In the next term, as in the last one, Yeltsin would be caught between market purists and the political demands of high office. How he would balance those powerful, conflicting influences is a matter of intense debate already.