Russia Congress Rebuffs Yeltsin, Rejects Premier

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s handpicked prime minister went down to defeat Wednesday in a climactic confirmation vote that left Yeltsin’s government weakened and his radical economic reforms in greater doubt than ever.

Yegor T. Gaidar, the young economics czar who has been acting prime minister since June, received 467 of the 521 votes he needed to win confirmation from the Congress of People’s Deputies, Russia’s conservative Parliament.

Although rejected by the Congress, Gaidar told reporters he expects to continue serving as acting prime minister until the next Congress in April, hoping that “we can still do quite a lot in these four months to carry out the reforms.”

“I was acting prime minister and I remain acting prime minister and I’ll continue to work,” he said, smiling and apparently unsurprised, minutes after the vote was announced. “For now, we have to work quietly and wait until the president makes some other decisions.”

It was not clear how Yeltsin would respond to the snub from Congress, probably his sharpest political defeat in almost 1 1/2 years as president. He had said he would not nominate an alternative.

Cabinet members announced they will not tender their collective resignation, as they had threatened. But they admitted they were disturbed by the vote. It indicated that their mandate for reform is dubious at best. It also may undercut their ability to run the country.

“This really weakens the general status of the government and has a negative influence on everything, including relations with the West,” Foreign Trade Minister Pyotr Aven said. “And the weaker the government, the more difficult it is to effectively carry out reforms.”

Gaidar’s rejection is certain to worry Western governments, which promised $24 billion in aid last April, largely on the strength of Gaidar’s presentation of Russia’s reform plans. But at home, Gaidar has been accused of pursuing a heartless “shock therapy” approach to reform. His rejection came as little surprise after the Congress voted Saturday to pronounce his government’s economic performance “unsatisfactory.”

In the 11 months since Gaidar began orchestrating the reforms by lifting state-set price controls and tightening the money supply, most Russians’ living standards have fallen drastically and inflation has increased to 2,200% a year.

Despite deputies’ economic complaints, Gaidar had appeared on Wednesday morning to have a decent shot at the confirmation, particularly after an impressive speech that won a long round of applause and rousing endorsements from several deputies.

The 36-year-old former economic journalist, a balding, rotund man with a pleasantly pedantic manner, told deputies that until now, he had concentrated on destroying the old Communist institutions that made up a planned, centralized economy. He said that in the next year, he could focus on more “constructive” work, encouraging new businesses and selling off more state-owned property.

Gaidar predicted that living standards would stop plummeting in 1993, inflation would slow and the drop in production would begin to level off. He also promised personnel changes in the Cabinet and asked for the chance to “bring to fruition” the reforms he had begun.

Vladimir Lukin, the Russian ambassador to the United States, said that Gaidar has grown tremendously in the past year to the point that “personally, politically and professionally, he is close to a real prime minister in this critical period.”

Deputy Larisa Mishustina argued that Gaidar’s reforms are far less terrible than the economic paralysis of the first years of perestroika , and military historian Dmitri Volkogonov told deputies that “in essence, Gaidar is a symbol. Either we go forward to a new Russia or we go backward.”

But Gaidar faced a Congress made up of about one-third Yeltsin backers, one-third hard-liners and one-third of what Russian analysts call “the swamp”--a large bloc of generally undecided deputies.

And he was up against sentiments like those expressed by opposition member Nikolai Pavlov.

“Tell me, how can the president make me vote for Gaidar?” Pavlov said in an interview. “What arguments can he find if Gaidar has robbed my mother of her life savings? He cleaned her pockets out to the last kopeck by his reforms. She can’t even afford to die decently now. And this is but one of millions of examples.”