"There are two ways out of this crisis for Russia - one realistic, one optimistic," said Mr Yevgeny Yasin, a former economics minister. "The realistic way is for aliens from another planet to land and sort everything out. The optimistic way is for the Russians themselves to grasp what they have to do."
If ordinary people are baffled by the suddenness of the chaos which has jammed the machinery of the Russian state, and the obscurity of its origins, their rulers appear equally incapable of taking decisive action to restore order.
Yesterday's draft political accord hammered out between parliament, President and government should have been a historic step, a victory for democracy - a moment when the people's elected representatives, without civil war or bloodshed, united against an over-powerful head of state to assert their role in determining the country's course.
But despite triumphant claims that the deal represented Russia's first real political compromise, it soon emerged that the deal was no deal at all, and raised more questions than it answered.
The outlines of the document were clear enough - an 18-month moratorium on parliament, government or President trying to unseat each other; and the start of a process to redraw the 1993 constitution, redistributing power away from the presidency in favour of the Duma and the government. Yet there was no guarantee that Mr Yeltsin would agree, or that it would bind him to anything if he did. The aim of the prime minister-designate, Mr Victor Chernomyr
din, is clear enough. He wants the political accord signed and sealed as fast as possible so parliament can approve his candidacy and he can set about forming a government. But the world will not find out until today whether, as planned, a grand signing ceremony between Mr Chernomyrdin, Mr Yeltsin and the chairmen of both houses of parliament will bless the accord any time soon.
The President and prime minister-designate are trying to pressurise deputies into approving Mr Chernomyrdin in an emergency session at noon Irish time, in order to have some semblance of a credible Russian leadership in place when President Clinton arrives tomorrow.
That timetable is now in question. After Mr Chernomyrdin trumpeted the accord as a done deal, Mr Zyuganov said the Communists wanted it to include a commitment from the government to renegotiate the terms of the current IMF loan programme - something Mr Chernomyrdin is likely to find impossible to accept.
The Communists may be posturing in advance of caving in, as they have so often before. But Mr Gennady Zyuganov has played his greatly strengthened hand skilfully through the crisis.
With the fall of the rouble, price rises and bank runs set to resume today, Russian business is growing impatient at the delay in getting a government in place. "If we don't get a reliable rouble-dollar exchange rate soon, the suspension of account-settling will become catastrophic," said Mr Mikhail Fridman, head of the once-mighty Alfa Group. Each name mentioned so far as a possible member of a Chernomyrdin cabinet rings like the toll of a bell at Russia's funeral, from the young geographer, Mr Igor Shabdurasulov, to the manipulative businessman, Mr Boris Berezovsky, from Mr Sergei Kalashnikov, a member of Mr Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultra-nationalist LDPR, to the former interior minister and military strategist during the Chechen disaster, Mr Anatoly Kulikov.
"The collapse of the liberal-democratic idea means that we automatically swing leftwards," said commentator Leonid Radzikhovsky, in Sevodnya newspaper.
There is another reason why the final shape of the political accord is more important than whether Mr Chernomyrdin gets approved today, which is that democracy itself is important. In their panic over economic breakdown spreading westwards, Western leaders seem to have lost sight of the origins and importance of their own democratic institutions. This is the mistake made before, in 1993, when the West failed to differentiate between a democratic institution - the old Russian parliament - and the MPs, some of them bigoted demagogues, who happened to be inside it at the time Mr Yeltsin illegally closed it down.
If Russia isn't allowed a chance to fine-tune its democracy now, even if some of the people doing the fine tuning are hardly democrats, the free market economy will come a cropper a few years down the road anyway. After all, there are many countries where there is a free market and no democracy, but none where there is a democracy and no free market.