Yeltsin Calls for Cease-Fire in Battle With Lawmakers : Russia: Despite barrages of criticism between his reformers and foes, there are signs of reconciliation.

Amid signs of a possible alliance with key rivals, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin called Tuesday for a cease-fire in the mounting political war between Russian lawmakers and his reformist government.

“It is clear that Russia needs a respite from completely useless political confrontation,” Yeltsin told a meeting of regional leaders.

Continued infighting “could bleed the country dry and lead it into a dead end,” he said, according to the Itar-Tass news agency.

In the run-up to the critical session of the Congress of People’s Deputies that convenes next Tuesday, the barrages of criticism exchanged between Yeltsin’s backers and opponents have reached a near-hysterical pitch.

Several lawmakers even accused Yeltsin of being a stooge for the CIA in an article published last weekend in the daily Sovietskaya Rossiya. The attack brought a furious counter-thrust from Yeltsin’s press secretary, who denounced the article’s signers as “political scoundrels.”

The broad attacks on Yeltsin and his painful economic reforms have led to speculation that the Congress could pass a vote of no confidence in his Cabinet and refuse to renew Yeltsin’s special powers to pass laws by decree. But Tuesday, the mood among Russian politicians and especially in the Supreme Soviet, Russia’s standing legislature, appeared to be shifting toward reconciliation.

Lawmakers said that the Civic Union, a centrist coalition that claims to have the backing of 400 of the Congress’ 1,061 deputies, has agreed with Yeltsin’s Cabinet on the outline of an economic program for the coming months. Although Civic Union leaders are still pushing Yeltsin’s free-market economists to freeze prices and give more subsidies to floundering giant factories, the announcement of the common program means that Yeltsin has a new chance to survive the Congress with a strong block of deputies behind him.

“We industrialists see our main goal as preventing the further collapse of our industry,” said Alvin Yeryomin, chairman of the Supreme Soviet’s committee on industry and a Civic Union backer.

The program indicated the lines that Yeltsin will pursue as he tries to win Congress’ support for continuing his push toward a market-driven economy. It promotes tax breaks on profits that are plowed back into investment, a graduated income tax and tougher tax collection, among other measures.

In an even more promising move, the government’s erstwhile critic, Supreme Soviet Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, said he thinks lawmakers should extend Yeltsin’s extra decree-making powers. The Congress “could support the idea of extending the president’s special powers through the end of 1993,” Khasbulatov told a meeting of Parliament factions.

But at the same time, he warned in an interview published Tuesday that, if Yeltsin made good on some of his veiled threats and tried to dissolve the Parliament and institute one-man rule, he would ruin the country. “This country simply won’t survive another dictatorship,” Khasbulatov said.

In a new show of his political toughness, Yeltsin on Tuesday fired Yegor Yakovlev, the head of the main television network of the Commonwealth of Independent States, accusing him of violating presidential decrees and of unfair coverage of the ethnic conflict in southern Russia.

Yakovlev said in a broadcast interview that he believes Yeltsin objected to a film shown Monday night about the plight of the Ingush people caught in the conflict in the Russian region of North Ossetia. Yakovlev, clearly holding no rancor toward Yeltsin, said he would be gratified if his resignation “satisfied the appetites of the opposition” for sacking members of Yeltsin’s entourage.

“If my resignation will work for civil peace, which we all want so badly, then let it be so,” he told viewers. “But if it’s dictated by the striving we all know so well to have the freedom to lie, only to have historical truth restored later, then it’s tragic.”