NEWS ANALYSIS : Under Fire From the Hard-Liners, Yeltsin Launches a Counterattack : Russia: The president tries to bypass the conservative legislature by taking his program of reform to the people.

Declaring a “constitutional crisis” amid a revived onslaught by opponents who are loudly questioning his policies, his motives and even his drinking habits, President Boris N. Yeltsin now wants a political New Deal in Russia.

“The sociopolitical situation in Russia is difficult, and forces opposed to the reforms are beginning to rear their heads,” Yeltsin said this week, singling out conservatives and Communists who he said have sneaked back into positions of power.

The route he proposes out of the “crisis” exploits his most enduring political asset--his standing among common Russians. Yeltsin’s proposed gambit: to short-circuit, if need be, the legislature, where old-time party leaders and neo-Communists still hold many seats.

In the city of Barnaul, Yeltsin announced that if the Supreme Soviet doesn’t empower him as president to call a referendum to get the constitutional changes he seeks, including legalization of private land ownership, he wants his countrymen to gather 1 million signatures so he can organize a plebiscite himself to demand beefed-up powers for the presidency and legalization of the buying and selling of land.

“Do you support that?” he asked his Siberian audience in a taped excerpt shown on television.

Many of his listeners clapped lustily.

Either path envisaged by Yeltsin would bypass the Congress of People’s Deputies, the larger national Parliament rife with Soviet-era apparatchiks who balked last month at adopting a new presidential system of power and enshrining individual land ownership as a constitutional right. One newspaper called Yeltsin’s referendum idea nothing less than a “declaration of war” on the legislative branch.

But as Yeltsin was away from Moscow touring the rugged Altai and Buryat regions near the Russian-Mongolian border, his political foes, especially in the legislature, were savaging his leadership, particularly his five-month drive to create a market economy.

In light of the hardships now experienced by most Russians, such criticisms must have some effect.

“The reforms which are being carried out by Boris Yeltsin’s government have nothing to do with those he promised to the people when coming to power,” one prominent anti-Yeltsinite, lawmaker Svetlana Goryacheva, told a Moscow newspaper.

Present policies, she said, “are being carried out in the interests of the International Monetary Fund, our overseas ‘well-wishers’ and the home-bred criminal bourgeoisie.”

Another bruising remark came from Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi, now a darling of nationalist forces, who said, “Today we have neither a foreign nor a domestic policy.”

And even former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who had largely held himself out of the domestic political fray, jumped in with an interview published Friday, saying Yeltsin’s stewardship of Russia was marred by authoritarianism, the refusal to listen to opposing points of view and smug arrogance.

Members of the Supreme Soviet made some sort of showdown inevitable by demanding that Yeltsin, who also serves as Russia’s prime minister, appear before it to justify his actions since April’s session of Congress, which ordered that economic reforms be revised to spare the population at least some pain.

Supreme Soviet Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov said he thinks Yeltsin will speak next week. That address could be the next step in what political commentator Igor Malashenko, now deputy director general of the Ostankino TV company, finds is a logical counteroffensive being unleashed by Russia’s president against his critics.

“However popular Yeltsin is, or however broad the support of his electorate, it is clear such support will decline under the pressure of economic causes,” he said.

In Malashenko’s view, the sudden push by the Yeltsin team to put the history of the Soviet Communist Party on trial--a wish granted Tuesday by Russia’s Constitutional Court--is another maneuver in the quest to discredit forces now posing as a reasonable, more humane alternative to the inflation, unemployment and shortages sparked by Yeltsin’s crash attempt to create a supply-and-demand system.

Malashenko thinks the 61-year-old Yeltsin has by far the stronger position. But his well of support is not bottomless. A recent poll in 28 cities of Russia showed that only 22% of those responding thought the government can bring off its plans for economic change.

And the economy is not the only political fault line in society. On Wednesday, a bloc of anti-Yeltsin deputies demanded a vote of no-confidence in the government for its failure to protect Russians living in the embattled Dniester region of Moldova and elsewhere.

Another Communist legislator, Vladimir B. Isakov, who has demanded to know whether Yeltsin was drunk when he attended the summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States two weeks ago, wants a constitutional amendment permitting the transfer of Yeltsin’s powers to Rutskoi in the event Yeltsin were to be incapacitated for “health reasons.” That amendment would also make Yeltsin subject to a medical exam.

In Siberia, Yeltsin fended off some of the blows aimed at him from his Moscow-based enemies and the local populace. He predicted economic stabilization by the end of the year and then a bettering of people’s living standard.

During his Siberian swing, Yeltsin made it clear he will hang tough and not resign no matter how much political flak he has to take--but also that he will not seek a second term in 1996. In Ulan-Ude on Thursday, he said there is simply “no alternative” to his policies.

“I know that people are experiencing enormous difficulties,” he said. “But the reforms must be implemented to the end. This is a fact of life.”

Viktor K. Grebenshikov, a reporter in The Times’ Moscow bureau, contributed to this article.