Yeltsin, New Prime Minister Say Reforms Go On : Russia: They seek more Western aid, but donor nations are alarmed by shake-up.

President Boris N. Yeltsin and Russia’s new prime minister, seeking new aid from the West, offered vague assurances Tuesday that the ouster of the government’s leading reformer will not undermine its goal of building a free-market economy.

Yeltsin told visiting German Chancellor Helmut Kohl “there will be no backtracking” from reforms under Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, the conservative industrial manager chosen prime minister Monday by a rebellious legislature to replace Yegor T. Gaidar.

Chernomyrdin (pronounced Chair-no-MIR-din) met reporters and declared: “There will, of course, be changes in the program because practice will enable us to introduce corrections and new elements. But the main policy line will be continued.”

However, Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, chairman of the Congress of People’s Deputies, which gained considerable power at Yeltsin’s expense during its recent session, branded the reform program “destructive” and said it “does not have the potential to survive.”

These conflicting remarks only deepened the uncertainty surrounding Russia’s post-Communist future after a year of economic upheaval. But they appeared to indicate that the changes certain to come will be applied with caution on a people bewildered first by the death of communism and now by the sudden departure of Yeltsin’s most trusted aide.

Chernomyrdin, 54, a low-profile apparatchik on the Communist Party Central Committee when it ran the Soviet Union, admitted feeling awkward in front of microphones and being unprepared to say much on his first day on the job. He said he had not even begun talks on forming a new Cabinet.

Until then, he said, he would make no changes in his predecessor’s deficit-slashing 1993 budget or halt his ambitious selloff of shares in thousands of state-owned companies to the public.

Privatization and withdrawal of subsidies to Soviet-era industries are crucial but controversial and potentially reversible elements of the reforms that Gaidar launched last January. They were aimed at integrating Russia into the world economy after 70 years of Soviet rule.

The reforms were accompanied by inflation that reached 2,200% this year, a 50% slump in industrial output and a 20% shrinkage of the gross national product. The growing hardships cost Gaidar his job as acting prime minister when Yeltsin yielded to opposition in the more conservative Congress.

“Prices are growing every day,” Tatiana Khokhlatkina, 37, a secretary in a private Moscow company, complained on the street after hearing the news. “There was no faith in Gaidar. But I do not believe in anything now. I think nothing will save Russia.”

Gaidar’s commitment to fast-track reform did win Russia $24 billion in aid pledges from the West. Now his ouster has alarmed Western donor nations.

The first test of the new prime minister’s credibility will come Thursday and Friday when the Paris Club of creditor nations decides here on Russia’s appeal to delay payments on its $70-billion foreign debt. Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Shokhin, one of three Gaidar aides soon expected to resign, appealed to the creditors to grant the reprieve, saying the government change “has not yet led to any dramatic consequences in economic policy.”

But few Russian politicians, economists and consumers doubt that the Gaidar era is over. When he launched the reforms, the 36-year-old economist described himself as a political kamikaze with a historic mission to destroy the Soviet command economy as quickly as possible. He and his young team knew their effort would bring so much popular hardship that they would quickly burn themselves out.

In some ways, the gamble paid off. Russians have embraced a market mentality with enthusiasm, buying up 24,000 state-owned shops and 156,000 state farms. Money has replaced barter as the way to do business, and the streets of Moscow and other cities are full of vendors making lots of rubles in a freer economy.

But enduring elements of a capitalist economy are not yet in place. The government has only begun to sell off heavy industry, and factory managers appointed in the Communist era are resisting.

In a crippling blow to Gaidar’s program, the industrial lobby managed to stall his “shock therapy” by getting the Central Bank last summer to prop up scores of enterprises that cannot survive in a free market. The outpouring of cash, only recently brought under control, set off an inflationary spiral that wiped out many Russians’ savings.

“The Gaidar government needed four or five months more to make its reforms irreversible,” said Andrei N. Illarionov, an economist at the government’s Economic Reform Working Center. “Now, with the appointment of new people, the return to the old type of production is still possible.”