NEWS ANALYSIS : A Hero Stumbles: Passive Yeltsin Dismays Parliament

There was the president of Russia, towering over his audience in the Grand Kremlin Palace. He needed the Congress of People’s Deputies to confirm the appointment of his embattled top aide, Acting Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar, architect of the country’s fledgling free market.

President Boris N. Yeltsin, marshaling his best adjectives in an otherwise lame speech, praised Gaidar as “courageous, devoted to his work and . . . just plain smart.”

But the deputies laughed. Then they dealt Yeltsin the sharpest political setback of his presidency, voting Wednesday night to reject Gaidar and throwing the course of post-Communist reform into doubt.

For one of the few times since he climbed atop a tank to defy the August, 1991, coup by Soviet hard-liners, Yeltsin fell from his pedestal of awe and respect--into a funk of passive, hesitant behavior that dismayed both conservative foes and democratic supporters.

“I can’t recognize our president,” said the Rev. Gleb Yakunin, a Russian Orthodox priest and pro-reform Congress deputy. “That was his worst performance.”

To be sure, Yeltsin still dominates Russia’s political scene, and he is expected to keep Gaidar on as a lame-duck Cabinet chief for a few more months. But as reforms falter in a deep recession with high inflation and spreading poverty, Yeltsin is finding the Congress harder to manage.

How Yeltsin lost this dramatic showdown with Russia’s Parliament is a case study of a president torn between principle and compromise, a leader who first resisted the idea of horse-trading with lawmakers, then agreed, miscalculated and ended up offering too little, too late.

The 1,041-member Congress, elected before last year’s breakup of the Soviet Union, has always been a problem for Yeltsin. Each time it meets, twice a year, he can count on unconditional support from no more than one-fourth of its members. About one-third are hard-line opponents--right-wing nationalists and unrepentant Communists.

With indecisive steps, Yeltsin tried to swing the pragmatists in the middle--a group dominated by the Civic Union, which represents state industrial managers left behind in the rush to capitalism. Yeltsin met with the Civic Union on Nov. 3 and hinted his willingness to compromise on the pace and scope of Gaidar’s reforms. But he never followed through. After the Congress opened Dec. 1, he rejected an offer by the Civic Union to back Gaidar in exchange for some Cabinet posts.

The backlash was a near-disaster for Yeltsin. The Civic Union joined an effort in the Congress to strip him of his authority to hire and fire the rest of the Cabinet without legislative veto. On Saturday, that measure fell four votes short of the required two-thirds majority.

Suddenly, Yeltsin began listening to aides urging a deal. In a belated effort to save Gaidar, he gave Congress veto power over appointments to head four powerful ministries--defense, foreign affairs, security and interior. Aides counted heads and predicted a simple majority of 521 votes for Gaidar.

They overestimated by 54 votes.

“The president made a concession to the Congress without any guarantees,” complained Sergei N. Yushenkov, a pro-Yeltsin deputy. “They swallowed it without thanks.”

Given that the sharp initial downturn of Russia’s economy under “shock therapy” was meant to be painful, saving Gaidar might have been impossible under any circumstances. But emboldened Yeltsin foes warned that his problems were political, not just economic, and could get worse at the Congress’ next session in April.

“The message of this vote (against Gaidar) is that Yeltsin should work more closely with the Parliament,” said Sergei Fyodorev, a Civic Union member. “If he does not hear this warning bell, April might be the final toll.”

By that time, Yeltsin will have a chance to define himself as a crusader or a conciliator, a do-or-die reformer or a statesman.

His radical supporters have been urging him to dissolve the Congress, call elections of a new one and form his own political party. So far, the president has portrayed himself as a unifying statesman above the fray. And influential aides such as Sergei Stankevich have warned that abolishing the Congress would set off a destructive “wave of constitutional nihilism that cannot be stopped.” They want Yeltsin to deal with the Congress until its term expires in 1995.

“This defeat (of Gaidar) just shows that we’re still learning to play democratic politics,” said Leonid Gurevich, a Yeltsin supporter in the Congress. But others in this camp were dismayed that Russia’s democratic, populist president sat so passively during the bitter debates of the past nine days.

“We have lived with the belief that the man who led the reforms in Russia stood out for his unique ability to make the most unexpected, intuitive decisions,” Sergei Parkhomenko wrote this week in Moscow’s Nezavisimaya Gazeta. “But when the political confrontation reached its peak, we found this ‘strong man’ humbly waiting for his fate to be decided by others.”