A New Breed of Commissars Struggles to Install Yeltsin’s Reforms : Russia: They spread through the vast republic to oust local bureaucrats blocking radical economic change.

Alexander Kondratiev is a burly man with a jutting jaw, bushy eyebrows and the chest-first walk of a successful businessman.

In Penza, a Russian “everytown” of 600,000 in the Volga River region, Kondratiev embodies the formidable will of Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin to bring the sprawling, fractious mass of Russia under iron control.

Kondratiev is the new Russian commissar--and Yeltsin is hurriedly appointing him and dozens like him on the eve of attempting to impose radical economic reforms across the 11 time zones of the Russian Federation.

“Yeltsin won’t win if we don’t win,” Kondratiev said of the team he has begun installing since taking office as head of the new Penza administration. “Without us, he’s nothing. If the bottom doesn’t carry out the reforms, they won’t work.”

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev learned that lesson long ago, complaining for years that provincial bureaucrats were “braking” his reforms--and seeing decree after decree ignored by local officials.

Yeltsin is determined that things will be different for him. And so are his men in the provinces.

“I’ve published my program and explained everything,” Kondratiev said. “Power is power. Since my power is in place, there’s nothing to discuss. It’s time to work. And I will bring in my radical reforms, even if some people are unhappy.

“Russian people are used to power,” he continued. “For the last 75 years, power was based on sticks and rifles. But I want economic power, the power of law, of efficiency.”

Yeltsin began his push for provincial control this year by installing a new cadre of “presidential representatives” around the federation who act mainly as observers, watching for violations of Russian laws and Yeltsin decrees.

But since August’s coup attempt revealed great numbers of lingering Communist Party hard-liners, he has gained the power to simply dump local leaders and replace them with his own men.

Kondratiev, 44, an outspoken backer of radical economic reforms and former boss to 15,000 repairmen, seamstresses and others in a state-owned service firm, was a natural for the Penza job.

But the opposition and conservatism he faces illustrate just how far the glubinka , or deep countryside, still has to go before it conforms to Yeltsin’s visions of a prosperous new Russia.

“We expect open sabotage from the Bolsheviks,” said Alexander Kislov, Kondratiev’s first deputy. “The chairmen of the district councils are all Bolsheviks. And the deputies of the regional council are Bolsheviks too. And all the department heads. So far, we’re the only ones who aren’t--three or five people. So we’re surrounded. We try to show them the way, and they all say, ‘Yes, yes, we’re with you,’ but their deeds show otherwise.

“Power is not hard to take. It’s much harder to keep,” Kislov added, quoting Soviet founder leadeI. Lenin.

When Kondratiev looks out his new office window, he faces the massive back of a three-times-life-size statue of Lenin--still standing, unlike so many of its counterparts in other Soviet cities. And the running joke in town goes: “Socialism is still alive in three places--Cuba, North Korea and Penza.”

In a largely agricultural region of 1.5 million people, only 233 private farms have been created, despite Yeltsin’s push to increase food supplies by stimulating private producers. Only a handful of state-owned stores and apartments have been sold to individuals.

It was against this background that Yeltsin unceremoniously dumped the Penza region’s former leader, a longtime Communist Party apparatchik , and appointed Kondratiev, a can-do manager willing to begin the president’s reforms even before the president himself.

“We take the responsibility on ourselves even if the laws aren’t worked out yet,” Kondratiev said. “I’m responsible, I alone.”

Now, the half of the Penza region government building formerly occupied by the Communist Party lies in dim and ghostly quiet, the nameplates removed from the doors, and Kondratiev is systematically purging the bureaucracy, trying to remove the party dross.

Next will come the final stage in the sweeping-out of the old Communist apparatus: the removal of local council chairmen, most of them former Communist Party officials as well, at the district level.

When Kondratiev, whose rank could be compared to an American governor’s, is done with that, the entire structure of Russian government in Penza should, theoretically at least, be purged of the old cadres and staffed by reformers.

This winter his main task will be to distribute the land from collective farms to private farmers in time for spring planting, he said. At the same time, up to 70% of the Penza region’s stores, restaurants and other small establishments should be privatized along with housing.

Kondratiev is also pushing a project for an international airport in Penza and seeking foreign investment to help fill the region’s unused industrial space.

“My task as head of the administration is to show people that they can get rich,” he said, not even flinching at an adjective that still sounds slightly indecent in the Communist-conditioned Russian language. “We’ve won--we’ve shown that ideology brought us into a blind alley. Now we have to show the way out of that blind alley.

“I’ll organize a new class of people who will be leaders and entrepreneurs and farmers,” he said, “who understand that it’s better to work for private enterprises than for the state,” and who will be willing to fight for reforms and the new leadership.

Penza has a small stock market and a growing business press that hint at a developing bourgeoisie. But the new Business Club--a luxurious, renovated house boasting meeting rooms as well as a fancy bar with peroxide-haired waitresses--has so far gathered only 64 members who can afford the membership fee of 5,000 rubles. That’s just over $100 at the new tourist rate of exchange.

Yeltsin’s local leaders aim to swell the new middle class, the contingent of homeowners and landowners, as fast as they can.

“We think that the guarantee against social explosion lies in the speed of reforms,” said Kondratiev’s deputy, Kislov.

“If you have your own things, you have your own home, then you won’t go on strike. You’ll go to work to produce more products,” Kondratiev added.

Yeltsin appointed the administration heads himself on the grounds that holding elections this year as scheduled would divert too much energy from economic reforms. But the pain of those reforms is likely to bring powerful pressure on leaders who, because they were not popularly elected, cannot be absolutely sure of their legitimacy.

“The people should not be deprived of their democratic rights,” Vladimir Sharoshkin, editor in chief of the newspaper Our Penza, said of the election cancellation.

Anatoly Kovlyagin, the Penza region leader who was removed by Yeltsin, said he also believes that elections--in which he would have had a fair chance at winning--should have been held.

“I defended the point of view that you can’t keep denying people the right to choose a leader,” said Kovlyagin, a soft-spoken man in heavy-framed glasses, his hair swept back from his forehead in traditional Soviet style. “It’s humiliating for the people.”

But Alexander Knyazyev, a sociologist and member of Kondratiev’s fledgling brain trust, said that it is unrealistic to expect true democracy at this stage in Russian history.

“In the jump from totalitarianism to democracy, we can’t skip the middle stage--authoritarianism,” he said. “Right now, we’re just in the process of forming an authoritarian regime under democratic labels.”

By replacing what was formerly called the Oblispolkom, or Regional Executive Council, with the new administration, Yeltsin replaced officials controlled by an elected local council with officials controlled, in the final analysis, by him.

It appears an unjustly harsh fate for Kovlyagin, who recalled in a hushed interview in a government office how hard he had worked during his two years as council chairman and affirmed his own support for radical reforms.

“I was never a bureaucrat,” he said. “The technical service (of Yeltsin’s Moscow administration) has an indiscriminate, blanket approach that if someone was in the party structures, he’s spoiled.”

But even an initially subtle difference between a Kovlyagin and a Kondratiev can be significant, the new chief’s men said.

“They may all say they’re for the reform program, but one would turn his back to it and the other would run ahead of it,” said Alexander Korobchenko, another sociologist on Kondratiev’s team.

In less subtle ways, Kondratiev and his ilk are bringing a whole new style to Russian politics.

A born-again Russian Orthodox believer, Kondratiev appealed to the local archbishop, Father Serafim, to bless his actions within days of taking his new post.

After receiving the benediction in the archbishop’s icon-packed office and making plans to sanctify with holy water the administration building--formerly dominated by the ardently atheist Communist Party--Kondratiev said humbly, “I think our prayers were heard--or this was just something that was meant to happen.”

A new sense of drama colors leaders such as Kondratiev, replacing the tired, gray cliches of the Communist apparatus. Although naturally laconic, he makes no attempt to hide his full-hearted commitment to the task before him.

“If a person understands what road is right, nothing can turn him off it except death,” he said. “In April, I ended up in the hospital and thought it over a lot, and we decided finally--this is it. That was the turning point. And now it is time to act.”

Can this kind of leader fail?

Analysts Knyazyev and Korobchenko discussed the question in a small government office.

Korobchenko recalled that Pyotr Stolypin, the pre-revolutionary statesman, did indeed manage to introduce agrarian and some governmental reforms across Russia before he was assassinated in 1911.

“Yes,” Knyazyev pointed out. “But how did he end?”