Yeltsin Wins Solzhenitsyn’s Support for Strong Presidential Rule in Russia : Politics: Writer’s endorsement is a boost for leader enmeshed in a power struggle with legislators.

Bracing for a major showdown this week with the Russian Parliament, President Boris N. Yeltsin has solicited and won support for the principle of strong presidential rule from Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, considered by Russians to be their country’s greatest living writer.

“Yes, the Russian Federation with its size and diversity cannot exist without a strong presidential authority, which should be no weaker than that of the United States,” Solzhenitsyn wrote from his home in Cavendish, Vt.

The letter was read Sunday night on Commonwealth television during a 50-minute program devoted to Yeltsin’s views on the political and constitutional crisis leading to an emergency session of the Congress of People’s Deputies that will start Wednesday.

Yeltsin said he will ask Congress either to enhance his powers or to approve a list of questions to be put to voters in a scheduled April 11 referendum, including one asking whether Russia should be a “presidential republic.”

The outcome of the Congress is far from certain because its tough, conservative Speaker, Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, views Parliament as Russia’s supreme governing body and appears dead-set against either giving the president more authority or holding a referendum at all. Last week he accused Yeltsin of “extremely aggressive behavior” for hinting that he might close Congress and rule by decree if it refuses to compromise.

In this charged atmosphere, Solzhenitsyn’s long-distance endorsement of presidential rule was a boost for Yeltsin, whose battle with the legislative branch boils down to control of Russia’s post-Communist economic reforms and its foreign policy.

The Nobel laureate, banished from his homeland by the Soviet authorities in 1974, enjoys enormous prestige among Russians, especially among conservative nationalists who dominate the Parliament and accuse Yeltsin’s pro-Western economic team of selling out the country.

In his letter, Solzhenitsyn spared Yeltsin no criticism for Russia’s deep hardships. “What is happening in Russia is breaking my heart,” he said, adding that 14 months of free-market reforms have been “carried out thoughtlessly” and have “put the country into total poverty and despair.”

“The president and his ministers cannot ignore the yearlong whine of the people,” Solzhenitsyn wrote. But, with some deputies calling for Yeltsin’s impeachment, he also warned against a backlash.

“In such a moment,” he said, “it is especially dangerous to take radical political turns and to lose the direction toward the authoritative power of the president who has been elected by the nation and who stands above all political parties.

“The current politicians will eventually all die, but the weight of a wrong decision will remain on Russia’s neck,” he added. “If today’s deputies are concerned about the people, they will not search for triumph over the hated foe but for a stable position of the state’s steering wheel which would enable all of us to get out of the storm.”

Solzhenitsyn was banished four years after winning the Nobel Prize for literature for his monumental “Gulag Archipelago,” a chronicle of political repression in the prisons and labor camps of the Soviet Union. His citizenship was restored in 1990, but he continues to live abroad and speaks out rarely on events in his homeland.

Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn’s 1990 essay on “Rebuilding Russia” focused much of the political debate of that time on the survival prospects of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s Soviet Union and the viability of Russian independence.

Yeltsin, Russia’s first popularly elected leader, began wooing the reclusive, celebrated author last June when, on a state visit to Washington, he telephoned Solzhenitsyn in Vermont and invited him to come home. It was Yeltsin’s ambassador to Washington, Vladimir P. Lukin, who wrote a letter soliciting the author’s latest comments.

Lukin is a Congress deputy aligned with the Civic Union, a centrist bloc sharply critical of free-market reforms. A week ago Yeltsin addressed its leaders and won tentative support for a strong presidency.

Yeltsin has also appealed in recent days to other critics, including members of the resurgent Communist Party, in a bid to strengthen his hand at the Congress. In an interview on Sunday night’s telecast, he appeared rested, confident and well-prepared.

“I have become convinced that it is not those on the right, nor those on the left, nor the centrists, nor the Communists, nor the democrats who can save Russia,” he said. “We need consensus among parties and organizations.”

The slick telecast also showed the 62-year-old president playing tennis. It quoted his sports adviser and tennis partner, Shamil Tarpishev, as saying: “Boris Nikolaevich is a sportsman in his soul. He plays his best in the most demanding situations.”

Ill-briefed for the last Congress in December, Yeltsin resisted compromise and was forced to abandon the architect of his free-market reforms, Yegor T. Gaidar. He retaliated by seeking a referendum and, after tense negotiations, winning Khasbulatov’s approval to hold one next month.

But Khasbulatov is now campaigning against the referendum. Even some of Yeltsin’s advisers oppose the idea because it might tempt rebellious ethnic minorities to put the question of their secession from Russia to a local vote.

Heeding their advice, Yeltsin has switched tactics and is pressing for a “political truce” in which lawmakers would give up control of the Central Bank, the Pension Fund and other agencies that have thwarted his government’s effort to control inflation. He also wants them to yield him the authority to hire and fire the Cabinet, dissolve the Parliament and call elections.