Yeltsin Faces Showdown With Congress, Is Determined to Keep Gaidar in Key Job

Having survived an attempt by lawmakers to weaken his control of the government, President Boris N. Yeltsin faces a battle this week over the tenure of his acting prime minister and architect of Russia’s transition from communism to the free market.

Verbal sniping from both sides over the weekend indicated that hope for a compromise between Yeltsin and the Congress of People’s Deputies had dimmed after five days of bruising sessions in the Kremlin and that the Congress was unlikely to confirm free-market reformer Yegor T. Gaidar as prime minister.

But Yeltsin aides and allies said that the president is determined to keep Gaidar on in his temporary capacity rather than nominate a new prime minister acceptable to the ex-Communist apparatchiks, right-wing nationalists and state factory managers who form the legislative majority.

A vote on the nomination of Gaidar, whose faltering, Western-financed reform program was censured by more than 600 votes in the Congress on Saturday as harmful to “the interests of most people,” could come as early as today. He needs to be confirmed by 521 votes, a simple majority of the 1,041-member Congress.

“There are only two ways the situation may develop now,” Pyotr S. Fillipov, a pro-Yeltsin deputy, said Sunday. “First, Gaidar is approved and goes on with his reforms. Second, Gaidar is not approved but goes on with reforms anyway because the president keeps him for another three months.”

According to law, the president may keep a rejected Cabinet minister in office that long before nominating a new one. Such a step, in Gaidar’s case, would postpone the political showdown over Russia’s economic course until the Congress meets again in April.

By that time, Yeltsin’s aides hope Gaidar can achieve a delay on payments of Russia’s foreign debt and enough progress at home to make the march toward capitalism irreversible.

Other politicians warned that a vote against Gaidar would weaken Yeltsin’s standing. They said the president might avoid that outcome by offering to get rid of other controversial ministers.

“If the president wants to see his candidate approved, he must immediately hold consultations with the opposition,” said Boris V. Nemtsov, governor of Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod region. “Unfortunately, he has not been consulting.”

The Congress, elected before last year’s breakup of the Soviet Union, is leading opposition to the 11-month-old Gaidar program, which includes selling off state property, freeing prices and integrating Russia into the world economy.

These radical reforms have been accompanied by high inflation, deep recession and dwindling popular support for the government. A poll of 1,000 Russians, released Sunday by the Moscow-based Public Opinion Foundation, showed 40% want the Gaidar Cabinet to resign, against 31% who want it to stay. The rest are indifferent.

Lawmakers have demanded that Yeltsin slow the pace of economic change or preserve a large state role in production. But opportunities for compromise, which appeared ripe before the Congress, have faded since it convened last Tuesday.

First, Yeltsin refused an opposition offer to extend for a year his economic decree-making powers, which expired that day, in return for giving lawmakers the right to block the hiring and firing of Cabinet officials below the rank of prime minister.

Then, as Parliament Speaker Ruslan I. Khasbulatov pressed toward a vote to give Congress that power, tempers flared and massive scuffling erupted in the Grand Kremlin Palace. Centrists in the Congress, rebuffed in an effort to persuade Yeltsin to let them into a reshuffled Gaidar-led Cabinet, swung against the president in the balloting.

Tempers remained high Saturday after the opposition failed, by just four votes, to get the two-thirds majority it needed.

Khasbulatov denounced government “pressure by thinkable and unthinkable means” on the deputies and warned the government not to celebrate. “If you go on striving for despotic power,” he said, “this Pyrrhic victory will be your last, and it will lead to the destruction of our country.”

In such a climate, Yeltsin and the Congress are likely to remain gridlocked for months to come. While keeping his right to hire and fire most of the Cabinet, Yeltsin can hardly expect Congress to give him other powers he is demanding.

Sergei Loiko in The Times’ Moscow bureau contributed to this story.