Next Step : Yeltsin Gives Lawmakers Something to Shout About : He faces a Parliament full of old Communists. Expect fireworks at the new session.

For more than 1,000 deputies from the far reaches of Russia, today is their day.

It is the day they gather in Moscow to watch their president sweat through his defense of a year of reforms that unleashed 2,000% inflation and failed to halt Russia’s economic collapse.

It is the day they get their chance at revenge, as they plot parliamentary moves that could bring down President Boris N. Yeltsin’s Cabinet and strip him of his special powers to rule by decree.

And it is the climax of a biannual Russian cliffhanger, as Yeltsin, backed by the diminished-but-still-strong love of the masses, faces down a Parliament packed largely by old Communists.

The 1,068-seat Russian Congress of People’s Deputies, the highest legislative power in the land, convenes in the Kremlin today after several weeks of political brawling so punishing that one Russian newspaper compared it to two boxers slugging each other to pulp in the ring.

A bizarre legacy from the Soviet period’s special affection for extra-large city councils and parliaments, the Congress exists in theory as a kind of super-parliament, a twice-yearly convention empowered to amend the constitution by a two-thirds vote.

In practice, however, it seems to exist mainly to drive Yeltsin’s government crazy.

“Twice a year, we experience a political earthquake in this country,” Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Shokhin complained Friday. “Every time, the Congress brings with it an element of political cataclysm.”

Russian observers concur that this Congress, scheduled to last 10 days, holds little personal threat for Yeltsin himself. He was elected directly by 45.5 million Russians last year, and lawmakers acknowledge that they have no mandate to oust him.

But the Congress could refuse to renew the special decree-making powers it gave Yeltsin last year to help him ram through reforms. It also has the muscle to sweep away the team of young, free-market economists that make up Yeltsin’s Cabinet and to demand a rollback of his program.

So will it or won’t it?

Even the best of pundits on the Russian political scene are not in a betting mood.

The dynamic of Russian politics in the run-up to the Congress resembled a game of chicken pitting Yeltsin, a natural at intimidation, against deputies so hostile that two accused Yeltsin in print of being a CIA-controlled “agent of influence.”

Yeltsin has pledged never to violate the constitution by dissolving the Congress and declaring his own one-man rule. But at the same time, he has peppered his speeches with hints calculated to cast doubt on those very assurances.

“Do you really think your president would violate the constitution?” he asked innocently at one point and then immediately threw in: “Of course, it’s another matter if the Congress blocks the reforms. I took my oath to the people.”

In turn, deputies from what Russians call the “irreconcilable opposition,” a small but vocal group, have said they will move for a vote of no confidence in Yeltsin’s government and may try for an amendment that would eliminate the presidency altogether.

Members of the centrist Civic Union, which claims the support of 400 deputies, threaten to join Yeltsin’s hard-line opposition if he does not soften his reform program, and members of the liberal Democratic Russia faction threaten to turn against him if he does.

The pre-Congress hysteria reached the point that Dmitry Volkogonov, Yeltsin’s adviser on military affairs, warned that “if we collide, we’ll leave nothing but ashes.”

Although remote, the threat of “civil war in a country stuffed with nuclear weapons is a threat to all of humanity,” Volkogonov told the daily Vechernaya Moskva.

None of the previous six Russian congresses have avoided fierce political fights. At the last one, in April, Acting Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar and the entire Cabinet stalked out, offering their resignations in protest at the Congress’ attempt to water down their reforms.

This time, Gaidar is refusing vehemently to concede to Civic Union’s demands for a wage-price freeze and added subsidies to industry.

Deputy Prime Minister Shokhin said that if the government gave in to such demands, “it would be a different government and I would be the first to resign.” Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev has dropped similar hints, and liberals worry that although Yeltsin has said he would defend Gaidar, he may prove unable.

But the situation has changed since April, when the government’s resignation offer would have meant the end of Yeltsin’s radical reforms. At this point, Deputy Anatoly Medvedev said, Gaidar’s reforms are well launched and Russia’s economic future does not hinge on his personal fate.

“In Parliament, when we’re talking about reform, we should proceed from essence, not from names,” Medvedev said. “There is no getting away from reform. Russia is doomed to reform, anyway.”

More and more, talk in Moscow is of a coalition government, with a few ministers’ portfolios given to the Civic Union and other groups that need placating.

The idea of a government shuffle appeals to many Russians who have seen their buying power slashed and their jobs disappear under Gaidar. A recent independent poll for the weekly news analysis program “Itogi” found that among more than 1,000 Russians, 40% backed a partial change in the Cabinet, 27% would favor a whole new team of ministers and 18% wanted to preserve the current one.

Russians have grown generally more critical of the government’s economic policy as well. The newspaper Izvestia found in November that 45% of Muscovites considered the current economic policy wrong, compared with 36% in April.

But still, the Communists who espouse a return to the simple old Stalin days gathered only a couple of thousand people at their protest in Moscow this weekend, and the Gaidar team grows ever better at defending itself.

Last week, as he presented his Cabinet’s latest short-term economic program to the Supreme Soviet, Russia’s standing Parliament, Gaidar manipulated both numbers and emotions impressively, rationalizing away ugly statistics and subtly reminding Russians that Western aid would not flow to any other Cabinet.

Ultimately, the fracas promised for the Congress--and typical of every Congress so far--is not about the mechanics of reform, anyway. Nor is it simply wrangling between blocs.

It is bigger than that. The entire Russian political system is under repair, right down to its foundation, the constitution.

“The old constitution is just stuck together,” said Mikhail Krasnov, a legal expert at the prestigious Institute for State and Law. And with no new constitution accepted yet, “there is no real separation of powers.”

As a result, the executive branch--Yeltsin’s Cabinet--and the legislative branch--the Congress along with the Supreme Soviet--wrestle constantly for control.

Their battles go far beyond the usual wrangling between branches of power in Western democracies. The old Communist system collapsed so quickly and so completely that it left politicians with the sense that everything is up for grabs.

Yeltsin, calling last week for a political cease-fire, appeared to be setting his sights on a more lasting truce that would be embodied in an agreement between lawmakers and ministers.

“The Congress should set the tone for working out the principles of Russian statehood and government structure,” Yeltsin said.

Unfortunately for the Russian president, the Supreme Soviet appears to have beaten him to that idea, passing a law last month that would reapportion power so that the Cabinet would have to knuckle under even more to lawmakers’ dictates.

If the law gains the difficult two-thirds vote it needs at the Congress in order to come into force, Yeltsin will end up as ceremonial “as the Queen of England,” Deputy Gleb Yakunin warned.

Supreme Soviet Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov has tried to tempt Yeltsin into backing the government law by sweetening the deal: If Yeltsin will help get it passed, he said, the Congress will extend Yeltsin’s special decree-making powers for another year.

But Yeltsin did not appear to be biting. His aides said the president’s focus was elsewhere, on doing away with the unwieldy Congress by getting a new constitution--which includes only a normal, standing Parliament--passed as soon as possible.

He also called this weekend for creation of a broad, pro-reform party or movement, and said he would join it immediately--a notable change in tactics from his former assertions that the President should stay above factional politics.

“We need to shift to different structures of political power,” Shokhin said. “I would consider that a key initiative of the president” at the coming Congress.

He would not specify what Yeltsin would propose but made it clear that the president would take the offensive immediately.

“The mentality of this country is that defensive behavior is not welcome,” Shokhin said. “It is always taken as a sign of weakness.”

Yeltsin was further strengthened on Monday by a partial victory in Russia’s constitutional court, which ruled that he did not abuse his power when he outlawed the Communist Party’s national structure--although he had no right to ban local cells as well.

If the Congress follows the pattern of the past, Yeltsin will speak and then deputy after deputy will take the floor to lambaste him. Then, when all their grievances have been aired, the mass of relatively conservative lawmakers who make up the Congress will rally to his side simply because he is their leader.

The bellicose pre-Congress mood, the daily newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda predicted, must ultimately give way to peaceful compromise.

“The Supreme Soviet has been deliberately stubborn in standing against the president,” it said. “The president has been deliberately frightening the Parliament, and the Civic Union has been deliberately presenting the president with obviously unmeetable demands.

“In general, everyone is bluffing,” it concluded, “because no one has an unbeatable ace.”

The Money Struggle Russians who support government’s economic reforms: 31%

Oppose reforms but don’t have alternative: 30%

Support alternative programs: 9%

No answer: 25%

SOURCE: Independent poll for TV news show “Itogi”

The Power Struggle

The core of the conflicts in Russian government lies in:

Struggle for power: 64% Personal interests and ambitions: 9% Disagreements on economics, etc: 6% Political views: 5% Other or no answer: 16%

SOURCE: Independent poll of 1,000 Muscovites published in Izvestia. DATE?

The Gladiators

The Russian Congress of People’s Deputies has 1,068 seats, and members can now align themselves with as many factions as they wish. But at the coming Congress, they will each have to choose just one.

The 11 largest factions are closely divded among those for, against and waffling in their support for Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin. A rundown: PRO-YELTSIN

Democratic Russia (67 members). Pro-reform. This is the group that launched Yeltsin. It still supports him but is tiring of what it views as the slow pace of reforms.

Free Russia (58). Pro-reform. Supports democratic ideas of author and political exile Aleksandr Solzhenitsten.

Left Center (53). Middle-of-the-road democrats. Founded by Sergei Shakrai, one of Yelstin’s close advisers. Generally supports the government but believes reforms need fine-tuning. ANTI-YELTSIN

Communists of Russia (55). Less radical than some other socialist factions.

Fatherland (54). Ultra-nationalistic. Wants return of the Communist system.

Civic Society (52). Broke off from Yelstin’s own Democratic Russia and has soured on reforms. Demands the resignation of the government and strongly opposes its privatization program.

Rossiya (46). Strongly pro-Communist. Leads the call for the ouster of the present government. WAFFLING

Agrarian Union (148). Anti-reform. Represents the interests of the collective farmers and rural dwellers.

Industrial Union (70). Middle of the road. Demands changes in the reform program to give extensive financial support to domestic industry.

Sovereignty and Equality (50). Middle of the road. Composed of deputies from the republics and autonomous regions far from Moscow.

Smena (Young Generation)/New Policy (46). Middle of the road. Affiliated with the industrialists. Believes Congress should curb the powers of the Russian president.

SOURCE: Press Service of the Russian Parliament.