Profile : Kook or Crusader, Russia’s Top Legislator Steals Show : But the prickly politician’s slurs and constant squabbles could undermine his career as a committed reformer.

The man needs mental treatment, a popular Moscow newspaper declared. He almost single-handedly brought on a government crisis, a top presidential adviser alleged. And then there was the “worms scandal”--did he or did he not say he considered members of the Cabinet “worms?”

(He did, but not quite so bluntly.)

These are difficult days for Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, the highhanded chairman of Russia’s legislature, the Supreme Soviet, who has presided over the 1,049-member Congress of People’s Deputies expected to wrap up this week.

Always prickly and forever sarcastic, Khasbulatov had nonetheless gained popular recognition for his struggle to help Russia’s lawmakers break free from their Communist-era role as mere rubber stamps for leaders’ decisions.

But in recent weeks and particularly at this month’s Congress, Khasbulatov has violated so many rules of the Russian political game that commentators now say the 46-year-old economist, a member of the Chechen ethnic group from the northern Caucasus Mountains, may have doomed his own career.

And in the process, Khasbulatov has raised new doubts about the future of the legislature whose power he is trying to enhance.

“Everything he does works against the image of the Parliament as an independent intellectual force,” Olga Bychkova, parliamentary correspondent for the weekly Moscow News, said. “All that people see is a chairman who has his own ax to grind and forces the ‘children’ to do what he wants.”

Instead of simply increasing the legislature’s clout, Khasbulatov appeared during the Congress’ first two weeks to be mounting his own personal battle against the Cabinet, goading its ministers and encouraging deputies to weaken its radical economic reforms.

Since Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin released prices from state controls in January and allowed them to rocket upward, Khasbulatov has remained loyal to the president despite widespread protests.

But he has also repeatedly criticized the reform program, suggested that the Cabinet should resign and implied that he could run the economy better.

At the Congress, his criticism has crossed the line into humiliating derision: He accused Cabinet ministers of trying to “blackmail” deputies with their threat to resign and sneered, “The kids just lost their cool.”

This prompted top Yeltsin adviser Gennady E. Burbulis to exult: “Today, the Speaker has revealed his personal complicity in the conflict between the legislature and the government.”

Burbulis himself was not being entirely fair: Khasbulatov could not have single-handedly forced hundreds of deputies to demand alterations in the reform program. And a tug of war between the Cabinet and the legislature is natural as the young Russian democracy works out its balance of powers.

But Khasbulatov’s own abrasiveness magnifies the political tensions, and the more he tries to smooth things over, the worse it seems to get. In a televised apology to the Cabinet after his “kids” crack, Khasbulatov said he never meant to insult anybody. But according to the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, the apology itself added further insult because its wording implied that “if they were stupid enough to be offended, then I apologize.”

(It also showed the dangers of alienating the Russian media. For some reason, Khasbulatov spoke the entire 20 minutes looking foolishly upward toward the top right corner of the screen, and no one in the Russian Television studio was kind enough to correct him.)

“Khasbulatov’s basic quality is the constant desire to humiliate everyone,” Alexander Minkin wrote in Moskovsky Komsomolets, analyzing the psychological cause as a pathological mix of superiority and inferiority complexes. “He should be cured.”

Bychkova of the Moscow News argued: “Most of Khasbulatov’s actions have not a political but a personal basis. All his mistakes are not so much a problem with ideology,” she said, “but more that one day he’s jealous, the next day he’s proud.”

As the Congress has progressed, its chairman’s plight has worsened.

After Khasbulatov asserted that the newspaper Izvestia was millions of rubles in debt and suggested turning it back into the Supreme Soviet’s official press organ, outraged editors denied they were in the red and declared their intention to sue, possibly for tens of millions of rubles.

When he denied that he had ever called Cabinet members “worms,” journalists dug up a tape of their months-old interview with him and played it for national television. When referring to ministers who fail to keep their promises, he had indeed said, “I have some kind of deep internal contempt toward people like that, you understand, as if toward some kind of worms.”

Khasbulatov further alienated deputies by quipping, after one speaker warned of the dangers of psychotropic gases that can turn people into idiots: “I wonder, has anyone been spraying anything in our hall?”

The mounting attacks on Khasbulatov even included the resurrection of an old scandal: The legislative chairman chose to move into a palatial Moscow apartment that had been built for former Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev.

One Moscow newspaper published the floor plans, which were leaked at the Congress, displaying their glorious 4,760 square feet to Muscovites who are each entitled to an average of about 130 square feet of state-owned housing.

“The leak of such information, it would seem, is possible only if it has been decided that Khasbulatov’s political power will be laid to rest,” the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta speculated in a front-page article accompanying the architectural drawings.

For all the friction he has created, however, Khasbulatov appeared unlikely to be ousted from his seat at the pinnacle of what Bychkova called “the little empire which he rules with an iron hand.”

He has made many recognized contributions to the fledgling Russian state, from helping put together the Federation Treaty that has kept the country from falling apart to overseeing the writing of the new Russian constitution.

And a hearty majority at the Congress opposed consideration of a vote of no confidence in their Speaker. Ultimately, said one Russian journalist, the deputies’ attitude toward Khasbulatov boils down to: “He’s a boor--but he’s our boor.”

Biography

Name: Ruslan Imranovich Khasbulatov

Title: Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet

Age: 46

Personal: An ethnic Chechen--a Muslim mountain people, now seeking full independence from Russia, with a reputation as aggressive fighters. Holds doctorate in economics. Former Communist Party member. Married, with a son and daughter, Omar and Selema.

Quote: “I forgive you your sins.”--To legislators, after their reversal--after heated debate--of decision to make “Russia” country’s sole name