Yeltsin Economic Aide Quits, Says He’s Being Smeared : Soviet Union: Official claims conservatives have accused him of corruption in order to block change. He was criticized over massive import deal.

Another of the radical economists recruited by Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin to promote fundamental reforms quit Wednesday, charging that conservatives in the Soviet Union’s central government were smearing him with accusations of corruption in order to block real change.

Gennady I. Filshin, 59, the federation’s deputy prime minister for economic affairs, said that “well known organs”--an apparent reference to the KGB security police--were conducting “a persistent, purposeful campaign to discredit” him and the Yeltsin government.

“I am no longer able to carry out the duties of my office in accordance with its requirements,” Filshin said in his resignation, “and I am forced to waste much time in explaining obvious truths and disavowing unfounded, crude attacks.”

He added that he was resigning “to attract public attention to the alarming events taking place in the country.”

Filshin’s resignation follows those of Boris Fedorov, finance minister of the Russian Federation, the largest of the Soviet Union’s constituent republics, and of Grigory Yavlinsky, another Russian deputy prime minister, who quit when the so-called 500-Day Plan for rapid establishment of a market economy was blocked.

Ivan Silayev, the Russian Federation’s prime minister, told the republic’s legislature last week that the Communist Party and the KGB had begun a “witch hunt” against his government to ensure that Yeltsin could not undertake the radical economic reforms to which he had committed himself and his government.

Filshin had headed Russia’s State Committee on the Economy since July, after radicals and liberals won control of the Russian legislature, defeating orthodox Communists in last spring’s parliamentary elections. Along with Fedorov and Yavlinsky, Filshin had a mandate to turn Russia into the spearhead of radical economic reform.

But Filshin was linked last month to a $7.8-billion deal that would have involved the import of food and consumer goods by an obscure British company in exchange for 140 billion rubles, which could then be used to purchase state-owned Soviet enterprises when they are privatized or for the development of natural resources here.

That deal was blocked by the Soviet central government, which declared that the Russian government lacked the authority for such a transaction and had used an illegal exchange rate of 18 rubles to $1, roughly 10 times the commercial exchange rate established by the Soviet State Bank.

Filshin, who had proposed such deals as a way of bringing private capital and scarce consumer goods into the Soviet economy, had signed a letter of support for the contract between a Russian company and its British partner.

Conservative newspapers pursued the deal with uncustomary zeal, suggesting that he was either selling out state interests for personal profit or, as a businessman, was a simpleton. Sources in the Russian legislature suggested on Wednesday that Filshin had quit in anticipation of even more damaging disclosures as both prosecutors and lawmakers investigated his activities.

His resignation followed by a day charges by Soviet Prime Minister Valentin S. Pavlov that unidentified Western bankers had tried to oust President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in a financial coup last week. Pavlov had also accused Western companies of trying to lure Soviet firms into bad deals and warned that the central government would protect the country’s interests.

Although Yeltsin’s coalition of radical and liberal reformers strongly backed Filshin when he took office, many had expressed disappointment in his performance as deputy prime minister, criticizing his proposals as poorly thought out and his day-to-day administration as incompetent.

But Valentia Lantseva, a spokeswoman for Yeltsin, described the accusations against Filshin as “just the beginning of a series of provocations. The security organs are at their old games again.”