Yeltsin Sees Hardship, Then Year of Healing : Russia: He says autumn will be ‘tough’ but predicts that a new ownership scheme will make 1993 easier.

President Boris N. Yeltsin predicted Friday that Russia will face a new economic crunch combined with political turmoil this October, but he said he feels certain that the country will make it through to easier times in 1993.

“October will be a very tough month,” he said at a rare presidential news conference. “That’s when the political games will begin.”

But he discounted fears that as unemployment mounts and prices spiral higher, angry and despairing Russians will take to the streets and bring down his reformist government.

“I can’t say that we’ve definitely crossed the Rubicon and that there won’t be mass discontent,” he said. “I can’t speak so confidently today. But I have some internal conviction that we’ll get through this. Because the main thing is to get through this year. And ’93 will be easier for all of us.”

Yeltsin’s reformist Cabinet is expected to lift ceilings on energy prices this fall, prompting a new round of inflation, and food prices are also expected to jump because this summer’s harvest is being sold on the free market instead of at the former low, government-set rates.

Despite a recent government bailout, a wave of bankruptcies among state-owned factories is also predicted, and unemployment is bound to swell rapidly as cutbacks and layoffs take effect.

Yeltsin acknowledged that many Russians will lose their jobs as defense plants and other factories close down and retool, but he maintained that unemployment “will not be on the scale that exists today in Western countries.”

And just as times are getting hardest in October, he said, the government will begin passing out “privatization vouchers” in a massive program to give every Russian, from babies to pensioners, the chance to buy a small piece--about $60 worth--of state businesses soon to be sold off.

“It will calm people,” he said, “that we’re dividing up what is subject to being made private, and this will somehow pull people into this sphere where they own some property, or they can exchange the check for money or something else.”

With a special news conference Friday morning, Yeltsin’s Cabinet launched its campaign to explain to the Russian people how to navigate the coming voucher system.

Privatization chief Anatoly Chubais proudly displayed a mock-up of the ornate voucher each citizen will receive beginning in October, and he answered the first round of questions in what will be a public relations challenge so great that his team has said they may resort to comic books as the simplest way to show citizens how to use their vouchers.

Official chauffeurs, clustered around the government building where the privatization news conference was held, demonstrated the struggle of ordinary Russians to grasp the complex voucher program as they pelted emerging reporters with questions: “What does voucher mean?” “Can I use the voucher to buy a car?” “Do I have to buy these shares or not?”

Along with the potential calming effect of the voucher plan, Yeltsin said Russia could count on a harvest already sure to exceed last year’s and so can remain free of last autumn’s fears that winter would bring famine.

“This winter will not be hungry,” he boomed confidently.

Yeltsin held the unusual news conference on what he called “Victory Day,” the anniversary of the third day of last August’s coup attempt, when the Russian president and his allies decisively defeated the right-wing junta that tried to take over the country.

And he gave reporters, gathered at a new “Presidential Press Center” in the Kremlin hall where deputies of the defunct Soviet Parliament used to meet, a whole new version of the flow of events in those critical days in 1991.

In essence, Yeltsin said for the first time, the outcome of the coup attempt came down to a personal battle between him and then-KGB chief Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, who was the “main ideologist and organizer” of the junta that tried to oust Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and take over the country.

“I played out the whole game with him,” Yeltsin said. “I had to outsmart him. If I outsmarted him, I knew I would have made it.”

In describing his tactics, Yeltsin said he realized that to bring down the junta, he would have to persuade its members to leave the well-defended grounds of the Kremlin.

So he “negotiated” with Kryuchkov, demanding written proof from Gorbachev that he was really incapacitated and arguing that the whole “State Emergency Committee,” the team attempting to seize power, should fly to the Crimean dacha where Gorbachev was being held to get it.

They fell for it, Yeltsin said, and he dispatched his own plane with Russian government loyalists and “50 well-trained guys” to arrest the plotters.

“There are a lot of details of the putsch that only I know,” Yeltsin said, adding that he will probably feel compelled to write his own book about the three critical days last August even though at least a dozen are already out.

The coup failed, Yeltsin argued, because its perpetrators lacked the support of the people and “excuse me--the brains” to pull it off.

As he has before, Yeltsin assured his people that they need not worry about a repeat of those anxious August days. Unlike Gorbachev, who was betrayed by everyone “from his bodyguards to his prime minister,” the Russian president has put together a staff of loyal friends, he said.

“There will be no Putsch II,” Yeltsin declared.

Viktor K. Grebenshikov, a reporter in The Times’ Moscow Bureau, contributed to this story.