Yeltsin Report Tames Lawmakers : Russia: He says he will continue economic reform and pleads for help to move from brink of collapse.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin tamed a Kremlin hall full of fractious lawmakers Tuesday with a wide-ranging report on his economic reforms and a plea for help as the country struggles to move away from the brink of collapse.

“In the last three months, the government has shown that it can work,” he said proudly. “The government intends to continue on its course, no matter how difficult it gets with all the harsh criticism and opposition from conservative forces.”

Russian economics chief Yegor T. Gaidar gave the Yeltsin administration credit for persuading the West that Russian reforms are now worth investing in, resulting in a joint pledge of $24 billion that he compared to the Marshall Plan, the massive American aid injection that put post-World War II Europe back on its feet.

“Now we have all the conditions to repeat that success today in Russia,” Gaidar said.

The more than 900 members of the Congress of People’s Deputies, a querulous group split almost evenly between reformers and conservatives, held back Tuesday from pelting the Yeltsin team with complaints as they have in the past.

One deputy asked meekly from the floor: “Is our quick shift to a market system justified? Won’t it bring people more deprivation?”

“There is no doubt about the reform,” Yeltsin barked back. “This is the only way for Russia in its current condition.”

The Russian president did announce several changes in his reform policy, however, including lowered taxes and increased subsidies to foundering state businesses.

He also disclosed a shift in the strategy for selling off state businesses to private owners, saying that each Russian will be given a “privatization account”--credit to be used toward investing in companies and property going private.

“Privatization has been slow and ugly up until now,” admitted Yeltsin, natty in a steely blue suit but with puffier bags under his eyes than usual. “We need millions of owners, not a handful of millionaires. We need a mass quantity of entrepreneurs to get the economy out of crisis.”

Half an hour of deputies’ questions left the Congress’ chairman, Ruslan Khasbulatov, so underwhelmed that he moved to stop the questioning, since the queries “did not have much content anyway.”

Yeltsin can expect to face serious flak today, however, when the actual discussion on his reforms begins.

In the lobby of the Great Kremlin Palace, lawmakers were already complaining privately that the government’s reports had broken no new ground and proved extremely vague on such key questions as where the government will get the money for its increased subsidies to industry and farms.

“When Gaidar says that the government will keep pursuing the policy of reforms, I can’t help but ask myself what reforms the man is talking about,” businessman Mikhail Bocharov said.

And conservative deputy Boris Tarasov warned: “The reform is built on illusions. It doesn’t answer the needs of the people, and if continued, it is bound to produce more and more suffering.”

Although government officials took credit Tuesday for restoring some value to the ruble, increasing exports and improving milk and meat supplies in many cities, Yeltsin himself admitted that “there is no breakthrough yet--our economy remains a loss-making one.”

Russian government reformers won another victory Tuesday with the report that Yeltsin’s chief of staff, Yuri Petrov, had submitted his resignation. Petrov, a former Communist Party official from Yeltsin’s home town of Sverdlovsk--now renamed Yekaterinburg--is considered an old-style apparatchik who blocked reforms.

Prominent writer Yuri Karyakin had unleashed an embarrassing public attack on Petrov on Sunday, telling a pro-reform assembly that Petrov had turned the “living ring” of defenders who protected Yeltsin during last August’s coup into a “dead noose.”

Sergei Shakhrai, Yeltsin’s top legal adviser, said that if Petrov goes through with his resignation, “it can only help things.”