Clinton Wants Aid to Help Ordinary Russians : Policy: Aides prepare a package for summit. Plan may include drug shipments, program for new housing.

The Clinton Administration, scrambling to help Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin keep his job, has decided to shift the focus of U.S. aid to Moscow toward short-term projects that will yield immediate, tangible benefits to ordinary Russians, senior officials said Wednesday.

The goal of the new approach is as much political as economic: to convince the Russians that capitalist economic reform is a good thing--and that Yeltsin is still preferable to his conservative opponents.

“For most Russians, up until now, economic reform has meant nothing but hardship,” said a senior official. “If they ask the question, ‘Are we better off than we were four years ago?’ the answer is, ‘No.’ We want to change that.”

“We’re looking up the Russian equivalent for ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’ ” the official added, echoing President Clinton’s unofficial campaign motto.

Clinton aides have been working on a new aid package reflecting the change in goals, to be unveiled at the President’s scheduled meeting with Yeltsin in Vancouver, Canada, on April 3-4.

Among the measures under consideration, aides said, are emergency shipments of pharmaceuticals for depleted hospitals and pharmacies; a program to provide new housing for Russian army officers returning home from Germany and Poland; new ways to finance grain shipments, especially of livestock feed to ease a meat shortage, and financing for equipment to restart idled oil and gas wells.

The new package may also include proposals to help Russian defense industries convert to civilian use, an idea aimed partly at wooing some of the powerful leaders of those industries into the reformist camp, officials said.

Officials refused to say how much money Clinton will propose to spend because he has not decided himself, beyond an already proposed increase in direct aid from $417 million to $700 million.

But they said that the amounts will be substantial.

“I think the Russians will be very pleased, because there will be real money and it will move quickly,” one official said.

“Some of it is just freeing up money that’s already in the pipeline,” the official added.

As part of a drive to sell the idea of increased aid, Secretary of State Warren Christopher plans to give a speech in Chicago on Monday explaining the Administration’s commitment to Russia. Clinton himself may also schedule a speech on the issue soon.

Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev is expected to visit Washington on Tuesday to brief Clinton on Yeltsin’s political situation and prepare for the summit.

The focus on a short-term, political target for the aid is unusual--and could prove controversial. Aides acknowledged that they do not know whether short-term actions from Washington can have much effect on the political climate in Moscow but said they think there is little choice but to try.

Previous Western aid plans focused on long-term, fundamental restructuring of the moribund Russian economy. But when Yeltsin, facing conservative opposition, slowed the pace of his economic reforms, the United States and its allies withheld much of the $24 billion in aid that they had promised last year.

Of the aid that was sent--between $10 billion and $18 billion, depending on what is counted--most was in the form of loans that increased Russia’s already heavy debt burden.

That prompted some Russian officials and American experts to charge that the aid program was inadequate at best and a hoax at worst.

“There is a rising tide of anti-Americanism there, a kind of nationalism that says: ‘Do we really need the West? They aren’t doing anything to help us anyway,’ ” said Eugene K. Lawson, president of the U.S.-Russia Business Council, a private organization funded by U.S. corporations doing business in Moscow.

“The intention is to make sure there is concrete stuff on the table at Vancouver--some things Yeltsin can touch, see, feel and show to the man on the street,” said Lawson, who met with Vice President Al Gore and other officials working on the aid plan this week.

There is already disagreement over how much the United States should be willing to spend. Lawson, New York financier George Soros and Johns Hopkins University Prof. Michael Mandelbaum, a former Clinton campaign adviser, have proposed figures ranging from $1 billion to $3 billion for short-term aid, with additional contributions from Japan, Germany and other allies.

But Rep. Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.), the House Republican leader, warned this week that Clinton will “run into real trouble” in Congress if he proposes much more than the $700 million now on the table.

And the short-term aid program would only be a beginning. Once those measures are in place, the Administration wants to move ahead with medium- and long-term programs such as enterprise funds for Russian entrepreneurs; insurance and other incentives for trade and investment, and larger programs to send U.S. experts to help Russians restructure. Those were all ideas proposed by officials of the George Bush Administration; Clinton Administration officials have said they want to expand them.

And Clinton officials still want to pursue the large-scale debt relief and moves to stabilize the ruble that were the heart of the Bush Administration’s approach.

Officials in the new Administration said their aim is not merely to support Yeltsin but to bolster the idea of reform--even if Yeltsin himself fails.

The sense of crisis over Yeltsin’s showdown with the conservatives in the Congress of People’s Deputies, or Parliament, has eased, officials said.

“The situation really was brought to the brink of dividing the country, but people have backed off now,” one official said.