After weeks of diplomatic hand-wringing, the West's backing of President Boris Yeltsin, maintained despite doubts about his action in Chechnya and his perceived drift to the right, may be close to an end, diplomats said Wednesday.


European and American diplomats are less willing to give Yeltsin much more slack for fear of repeating the mistake they made with Mikhail Gorbachev. Western support for Gorbachev remained enthusiastic to the very end, even as he aligned himself with the right and abandoned reform.


The message that the West is trying to put across is that if Yeltsin takes one more dramatic anti-reform step, he risks losing his foreign support.


"That view is getting a very strong airing at present, certainly I would say both in the Western media and in official circles," said a Western diplomat in Moscow, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "Obviously, the Yeltsin period will have its end, and we may be at that end."


Any significant reversal of the democratic process and market-oriented reforms would be seen as a serious breach of the promise Yeltsin made to Russia and the West, and support for Yeltsin is most often linked, at least unofficially, to progress in reforms.


In some political observers' eyes, the promise has already been broken.


"The situation in this country is more or less moving in an authoritarian direction," said another Western diplomat in Moscow. "This is not an outcome of the Chechen crisis. This is an outcome of developments we had in the last year."


Should Yeltsin pull independent broadcaster NTV off the air, for example, Western governments would find themselves in an awkward position, though they called the move unlikely.


"If he did that, it would be quite serious for us, and then we would have to think what we are going to do," the diplomat said. "It's really difficult for him to come out of this as a winner and someone who is respected, not only within the population, but within democratic society."


If Western nations are on the verge of withdrawing their support from Yeltsin should he stumble once again toward the past, they face still another problem. Who would take his place?


The lack of a desirable alternative has caused one Western diplomat to advise caution before giving up hope on the Kremlin.


"What is the democratic alternative to President Yeltsin?" he asked. "We don't have any alternative. If we put up sanctions against Yeltsin now, we would just strengthen the other side of the political spectrum."


Before deciding whether Russia has completely relapsed, the West should recall how much the country has changed, said Dmitry Trenin, a political analyst at the Institute of Europe and the Carnegie Institute in Moscow.


Russia has a two-chambered legislature, whose power is limited but whose voice is unharnessed. And it has a free press broadcasting images of Russian corpses laying on the battlefield.


"For the first time, Russia is living in a time of war during a time of freedom of the press," Trenin said. "That's tremendous evidence" that reforms have reached critical mass. "We're seeing the kinds of things on TV that we have never seen before.


"Reform is under serious threat, but Chechnya is not proof that Russia has hopelessly fallen off the path to reform," he said.