Won’t Be Slave to IMF, Yeltsin Says : Russia: Independence assertion shows line he walks between foreign-aided reforms and domestic pressures.

Playing to the home audience while his economists court the West, President Boris N. Yeltsin declared Tuesday that although Russia expects to receive billions of dollars in credits, it will not take direct orders from the International Monetary Fund.

“We do not want to work under the IMF’s dictate,” Yeltsin said before flying off for a tour of the Russian Far North. “We don’t fully agree with the opinions of the IMF, and we will defend our point of view.”

The fund accepted Russia and 12 other former Soviet republics as members on Monday, clearing the way for $24 billion in credits that had already been pledged.

Yeltsin’s assertion of his economic independence just a day later bespoke the delicate line he must walk to make Russia’s reforms work with foreign help, keeping his balance between Western bankers’ demands for continued radical changes and pressure at home to ease up.

For domestic political consumption, Yeltsin also had to combat the image, so painful for national pride, that his economists kowtow to their Western counterparts.

One newspaper, Rabochaya Tribuna, hinted at national humiliation with its headline Tuesday: “Standing at Attention for the IMF.”

Fresh from a Parliament session at which his reforms were so jeopardized by conservative attack that the Cabinet threatened to resign, the Russian president appeared far more worried about such domestic pressure than problems with the IMF.

“We don’t want to be subordinate” to the IMF, Yeltsin told residents of the city of Arkhangelsk, as shown on Russian television. “We don’t want to be pressured. It’s not easy to pressure us.”

He also assured citizens that the government would alter its reforms in such a way that “they will be a little softer and everyone will have it a little easier,” according to the Nega News Agency.

And, asked by Russian reporters whether he is worried that IMF programs might lead to social upheavals as they have in other countries, Yeltsin said that his government would never let social programs collapse that far, the Interfax news agency said.

Alexei Ulyukayev, the Russian Cabinet spokesman, minimized the disagreements with the IMF that Yeltsin referred to, saying that “we have no differences in principle with the IMF. We (only) have some tactical differences.”

For example, he said, Russia had promised in a memorandum to the IMF that it would free prices on fuel by the end of April, but had to put off the move for more than two months.

“In most areas of tactical differences, we find full understanding from the IMF,” Ulyukayev said. “In macroeconomic strategy we enjoy full understanding.”

The Russian Cabinet has considerably watered down the radical moves to which it committed itself in its crash plan to shift the country from the old socialist economy to a new market-driven one. It agreed in recent weeks to allow a larger budget deficit, subsidize failing factories to stem unemployment, and ease taxes.

“The position of the IMF is clear,” warned Nezavisimaya Gazeta, a popular newspaper. “It demands that we observe impeccably the reform we announced.”

The paper called it unlikely, however, that the government’s changes in policy to this point would be enough to jeopardize IMF support, and economics chief Yegor T. Gaidar has been doing his best in Washington recently to convince lenders that his Cabinet is as strongly committed to reform as ever.

With the $24 billion in Western credits now assured, attention turned Tuesday to how the money will be used.

“We are not going to plunge headlong and grab the $24 billion that we’ll be given right away,” Yeltsin said. “We’re acting very carefully, and we’ll take a certain amount of dollars for this or that program.”

But former top Soviet government economist Grigory Yavlinsky cast doubt on Russian plans to spend the money.

Thus far, he told the daily newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, the government has not seen fit to publish its plans for the money--and “no one will say whether they exist,” he noted.

“The International Monetary Fund has been successful at supporting reforms, but there are also opposite examples,” he said. “Everything depends on us. If the government is not capable enough, careful enough, perceptive enough and principled enough . . . the IMF credits could turn out to be big long-term losses.”

Yeltsin said he hopes that whatever disagreements remain with Western leaders can be resolved at the U.S.-Russian summit planned for June and at July talks in Munich with the world’s top seven industrial nations.

“The official trip to Washington and the meeting of the G-7 in Munich will be to dot the i’s and cross the t’s,” Yeltsin said. “We will find a common language.”