Yeltsin’s Nemesis Rebuffs Olive Branch : Politics: Conservative lawmaker says president’s power must be trimmed, setting up clash between government branches.

From the depths of Siberia on Friday, Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, Russia’s most powerful conservative, scornfully rejected a “banal” compromise plan offered by President Boris N. Yeltsin, ensuring that this country’s political turmoil will roil on.

Yeltsin’s offer for a truce between warring government branches, Khasbulatov scoffed, will not “play the role of some savior or a messiah.”

Colliding head-on with the president’s proposals, the Supreme Soviet chairman told a conference of regional lawmakers in Novosibirsk that Yeltsin’s office is vested with too many powers and needs to be trimmed.

Khasbulatov said that “new laws should strictly determine that the government is subordinated to Parliament”--a far cry from allowing Yeltsin to be a head of state on the U.S. or French model.

The acerbic remarks were Khasbulatov’s first since Yeltsin’s offer Wednesday to refrain from some government acts if lawmakers yield control of the Central Bank and money supply to Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin’s Cabinet.

Khasbulatov’s opposition means that Russia is still headed for a potentially disruptive April referendum on how to redistribute political power unless the two rivals reach an agreement in the meantime.

Yeltsin’s press secretary, Vyacheslav V. Kostikov, said Khasbulatov’s comments were intended to break off negotiations that began two weeks ago. “It is becoming clear that R. I. Khasbulatov is increasingly discrediting himself as a party in negotiations,” Kostikov said in a statement.

To end the standoff that has crippled the government’s ability to deal with an economic crisis and a vast array of other problems, Khasbulatov proposed that both the Supreme Soviet and Yeltsin stand for early election next year.

In a televised address to the nation Thursday, Yeltsin rejected that seemingly equitable approach. Instead, he wanted everyone to lop a year off his or her term of office.

That would mean Khasbulatov and his fellow deputies would have to run in early elections in the spring of 1994. Yeltsin could remain president for one year longer.

Yeltsin also wants a new constitution to be adopted by a special assembly convened for the purpose. But Khasbulatov said it would be “no tragedy” if he and other deputies--men and women who are frequently former Communist Party leaders or hacks--did it.

Besides, Khasbulatov asserted, 310 amendments have already been made to Russia’s Soviet-era constitution, making the existing document quite democratic.

In Khasbulatov’s view, Yeltsin’s presidential powers were beefed up primarily when he appeared to be the sole bulwark against Soviet totalitarianism. But times have changed to require “sufficient order,” he said.

Now, Khasbulatov said, the role of the president should be limited by law to the prerogative of nominating a prime minister, who will then form a government subject to the approval of the Supreme Soviet.

He and Yeltsin concurred on one point--the advisability of getting rid of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the rarely convened super-legislature that constitutionally remains the supreme government body. Khasbulatov said the smaller Supreme Soviet should become the only lawmaking organ.

Yeltsin said Thursday that if he cannot reach a negotiated accord with Khasbulatov, he will take his arguments to the people in the April referendum on a proposed new system of government. But Khasbulatov warned that the vote could undermine the country if some of Russia’s increasingly fractious regions refuse to take part.

“The current crisis in the country . . . could turn this instrument into an instrument of confrontation and put the integrity of the Russian state at threat,” Khasbulatov said.