Russia Replacing Idealists With Economic Pragmatists : Reforms: But a leading adviser says Yeltsin has not abandoned steps to improve production and revive the collapsed economy.

The idealistic, pro-market economists who have spearheaded Russia’s reforms over the last five months are being replaced with pragmatic specialists who will be expected to improve production and breathe life into the country’s collapsed economy, a leading economic adviser to the Russian government said Thursday.

The new faces in the government’s economic team, however, do not mean that President Boris N. Yeltsin has abandoned his market-oriented reforms, the adviser, Alexei Ulyukayev, stressed.

Three newly appointed top government officials, he noted, are veteran industrialists who directed successful enterprises during the Soviet period.

For example, the highest ranking of the new appointees, First Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir F. Shumeiko, formerly was the director of a large factory in southern Russia that manufactures measuring equipment.

Ulyukayev said the new officials are not “conservatives who will undermine reforms” but experienced practitioners who will be depended on to launch Yeltsin’s “medium-term program” designed to spark economic growth and establish new economic structures.

As the experience of the formerly Communist countries of Europe has shown, Ulyukayev said, staunch economic liberals “are pretty good at solving the problems of the first period of the reform and macroeconomic stabilization” but are not successful at stimulating economic growth.

Yet Mikhail L. Berger, economic editor of the newspaper Izvestia, said the government team now represents too heavily the interests of industry, something he said could lead to worse inflation and otherwise impede reforms initiated by Yegor T. Gaidar, chief of Yeltsin’s economic team.

“Gaidar’s team is now so diluted with practitioners that he may resign on his own initiative,” Berger said. “This is very dangerous (for the economy).”

A television news commentator agreed: “Reshuffling of the ministers’ posts will inevitably lead to a new quality (in the government). Romantics of liberal capitalism . . . are being replaced with the directors of corporations of the old administrative school. This may mean serious revisions of the entire reform scheme.”

Ulyukayev told reporters that the new government team is not primarily concerned with whether the International Monetary Fund will approve of its new makeup and priorities. The IMF, which Russia recently joined, makes financial support contingent upon Russia’s adhering to policies aimed at rapid transition to a market economy.

IMF officials have expressed concern that Yeltsin is compromising his reform plan. But visiting former President Richard M. Nixon told a group of Russian journalists Thursday that Yeltsin is not retreating from his commitment to free-market economics.

“President Yeltsin is not backsliding,” Nixon said after a meeting with Yeltsin. “You need medicine for a sick economy, but the medicine must not kill the patient.”