NEWS ANALYSIS : Yeltsin Shows He’s Almost Indispensable : Politics: Without him, the system is seen as too weak to deal with the vital issues facing nation.

As the Russian government resigned Monday amid conservative attacks on its radical economic reforms, the key political question was, “Where is Boris Yeltsin?”

The Russian president, who is also prime minister and the head of the government, was not at the Congress of People’s Deputies to defend his Cabinet and its crucial reforms as he had promised.

Nor had Yeltsin been there Saturday when lawmakers demanded that a new prime minister be named in his place and curtailed his authority to implement the reforms by decree. Nor had he participated in talks Sunday between the Cabinet and parliamentary leaders in an attempt to end the impasse.

Not even his closest aide, state secretary Gennady E. Burbulis, could explain Yeltsin’s prolonged absence as his government fell in the first such political crisis for democratic Russia.

“Yeltsin accepted the Cabinet’s statement (on the crisis), but has not made a decision on its resignation,” Burbulis told journalists late Monday. When would Yeltsin respond? “Everything lies in the future,” Burbulis replied.

All this was more than a passing mystery, for it illustrated that without Yeltsin, the Russian political system is too weak and unfocused to deal with the fundamental issues that the nation faces.

The Parliament, in asserting its constitutional authority over the Cabinet, had brought the country to a political impasse, and the ministers, in refusing to compromise with the lawmakers, had jeopardized the essence of the free-market reforms for which they were fighting.

Other questions, also important, emerged in the crisis--the constitutional division of political power between the executive and legislative branches of government, the men who will shape Russia’s new political and economic system, the future of the economic reforms themselves.

But the character of Yeltsin’s leadership was an immediate, even paramount concern.

Only Yeltsin, deputies acknowledged, could re-establish the political balance, and Yeltsin was strangely missing. He had met with his Cabinet for an hour early Monday, according to Yegor T. Gaidar, the first deputy prime minister, and asked it to remain through the Congress. But nothing further was heard.

Again, there was speculation about the 61-year-old president’s health, about a possible drinking problem, but aides shrugged off such talk as malicious rumors, just as they had done when he was missing earlier.

Did Yeltsin’s absence not prove, some deputies argued, that the real fight was between the president and his ministers, who had usurped his powers, been caught by Parliament and were now left to twist in the wind?

Was Yeltsin perhaps choosing the right moment to intervene, the point at which he could drive the hardest bargain with the Parliament, gain the maximum leverage and push through the whole reform program? He has used this tactic frequently.

Or was he deliberately allowing the crisis to build so that he could take the “tough option” and seek a new mandate for radical reform in a national referendum in June?

Through the day, the debate swirled around Gaidar, his controversial economic policies chief, and the rest of the Cabinet, but the solution lay only with Yeltsin.

The Cabinet would stay on, Gaidar said, if Parliament reversed itself and rewrote the resolutions restricting the reforms--or “if the president makes a decision allowing us to function as we must.”

“We roughly criticized our government,” commented Ruslan Khasbulatov, the chairman of the Russian Parliament, “but at the same time we asked the president--whom I personally trust immensely, and I think the people, too, believe in the president--to carry out a certain reorganization within three months.”

Ramazan Abdulatipov, another parliamentary leader, said, “We have a strong president who is perfectly capable of forming a new government. I just fail to see any tragedy in this resignation.”

Nikolai A. Pavlov, a leader of the Fatherland opposition group that pushed through the critical resolution, also saw Yeltsin as still the pivotal figure. “A favorable situation has arisen in which the president can form a coalition government of popular confidence,” Pavlov said, rejoicing in the Cabinet’s resignation. “Such a government will enjoy strong support.”

But with progress so dependent on one great, even heroic, figure such as Yeltsin, on his vision and his energy, the prospects for a thoroughgoing political and economic reconstruction of so troubled a country were diminished.

“The president cannot know everything, be everywhere or decide everything, and that should not be his function,” observed a political scientist who advised former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev for several years. “An element of this crisis is the misconception of the presidency.

“The presidency they are establishing for Yeltsin will take a veritable Atlas, for the whole of government will be on his shoulders . . . . This is more than blurriness in defining the respective powers of the executive and the legislative branches of government. It is a mistake that will bring crisis after crisis.”