Yeltsin Says He’ll Quit if He Loses Vote : Russia: If Parliament also loses, he will remain until new elections can be held, he asserts.

For the first time since he launched a grueling pre-referendum campaign last week, a visibly tired Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin laid out his plans for the various possible outcomes of the nationwide poll set for April 25, reiterating that he would quit if the vote goes against him but in favor of the conservative Parliament.

If a majority of the Russians who go to the polls vote against him and for the Congress of People’s Deputies dominated by his opponents, “the president will resign,” Yeltsin said, implying that he would do so immediately.

If, however, they reject him and also vote against the Parliament, he will remain president until new elections can be held.

“There must not be any power vacuum allowed this time,” he said.

Referendum voters will be asked four questions: whether they trust Yeltsin, whether they support his economic reforms, whether they want early presidential elections and whether they want early elections to the Parliament.

Yeltsin, who has urged Russians to vote yes on all four questions, said he expects the referendum’s results to mean that elections will be held this fall rather than in the fall of 1995 for the Parliament and in 1996 for the presidency.

With just days left until the vote that may decide his political fate, Yeltsin, triple-tier bags under his eyes, also said he would ask for the resignation of his backbiting vice president, Alexander V. Rutskoi, a vocal critic of his reforms.

“How can a vice president work if he disagrees with the reforms done by the president?” Yeltsin asked rhetorically at a Kremlin press conference. “It’s probably time for him to make up his mind.”

Under the Russian constitution, if Yeltsin resigns, Rutskoi takes over, a development that Yeltsin appears determined to avoid.

But it was unlikely that Rutskoi would agree to a request from Yeltsin to resign. The former air force pilot, general and hero of the Afghanistan war has argued that he too was chosen by the Russian people and will continue to serve despite friction with the president.

Considered a centrist, Rutskoi has repeatedly blasted Yeltsin’s reforms as overly radical and poorly run. He has also complained that the president’s inner circle allows him no access to real power.

Asked whether he was requesting Rutskoi to resign, Yeltsin said that “for ethical considerations, I must tell him that not in public but in private, which I will do.”

The Russian president also announced the elements of the new program he plans to implement if Russia’s 108 million voters back him in the referendum.

In the latest of a rash of promises he has made voters, Yeltsin announced that the millions of Russians who now only have the use of garden plots on state land would soon become their owners.

He also warned that he would crack down on business people who have slipped billions of dollars of profits abroad, saying they would face criminal charges.

Giving voters a major hint about his long-term plans for Russia, Yeltsin also announced the outline of the new constitution with which he proposes to replace the messy patchwork of new and outdated Soviet ideas now providing the shaky basis for the country’s laws.

The new constitution will carry Western-style guarantees of rights and freedoms for Russia’s citizens, make the country a “full-blooded federation” and provide clear divisions of power that would prevent a repetition of the current confusion over who controls what.

Yeltsin broached the idea that his revamped Parliament’s upper chamber could pass the constitution once Russia’s 88 regions, republics and provinces had approved it.

With surprisingly rosy economic figures, Yeltsin also set about trying to prove that the economy is already beginning to stabilize after the initial shock of the painful reforms he unleashed at the beginning of 1992.

He said inflation had dropped from 27% a month in January to 17% a month in March, and was slowing still further. The drop in Russian production, which totaled about 40% over the last two years, has stopped, he said.

“We have the basis to get out of this crisis,” he said.

Leaders of Russia’s 21 semiautonomous ethnic republics agreed Wednesday to take part in the April 25 vote. Yeltsin met with them and afterward declared: “I was worried beforehand that some republics might not take part, but I no longer have that worry.”

The republics range from tiny tribal territories in the northern Caucasus to the major oil-producing region of Tatarstan and the giant diamond-rich republic of Yakutia in Siberia.