Yeltsin Urges Regional Effort on Constitution : Russia: Move would bypass conservative Parliament. President makes clear political reform will get priority.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin urged regional leaders Tuesday to bypass the conservative Parliament and take control of a process to draft a new constitution with enhanced presidential powers.

More than two weeks after winning a vote of confidence in a nationwide referendum, Yeltsin also fired two senior officials who had resisted his free-market reforms.

Radical reformers have been urging the 62-year-old president to use his victory in an April 25 referendum to sweep away the Communist-era Parliament and constitution and to speed Russia’s transition to Western-style capitalism.

But while shaking up his Cabinet, Yeltsin made it clear in a Kremlin speech that political reform, not economic change, is now the top priority and will dominate his agenda for much of this year.

“You, and not someone else, should work on the constitution and adopt it,” Yeltsin told leaders of Russia’s 88 regions and autonomous republics. “This will be a constitutional assembly,” he added, ruling out for the first time any role in the process for the existing Congress of People’s Deputies.

Yeltsin delivered his speech in the same forum where he first unveiled his constitutional proposals April 29. His draft calls for a strong French-style presidency, with no vice president but a prime minister and Cabinet appointed by the president and confirmed by the legislature.

Under Yeltsin’s proposal, the Congress that was elected to serve until 1995 would be disbanded and replaced by a two-chamber Parliament. The legislative branch could still impeach the president, but the president, under certain conditions, could dissolve the legislature and call new elections.

The proposed charter would guarantee property rights for individuals and the right to buy or sell land.

Under the current constitution, drafted in 1977, only Congress may give final approval to a new constitution. Any move by the regional leaders to usurp that role is certain to be challenged in the Constitutional Court, whose often adverse rulings Yeltsin has taken pains to obey.

Without saying how the constitutional assembly would be formed, Yeltsin urged the regional leaders to call one into session June 5 and to approve the product of its work by the end of the month.

The regional leaders are an increasingly influential but mixed political bag. Yeltsin appointed most of them after his election in June, 1991, and some still serve without popular mandate. Others have since come to power through elections. It is uncertain how many of those leaders will back Yeltsin’s proposal.

Yeltsin has been speaking more aggressively against his critics since the referendum, and Tuesday he began to act. He fired Yuri Skokov, his security adviser, and Deputy Prime Minister Georgy Khizha, his overseer of the military-industrial complex.

During a year in government, both men had criticized such cornerstone Yeltsin reforms as uncontrolled pricing and swift privatization of state-owned companies.

Radical reformers have been disappointed in Yeltsin’s lack of economic reform initiatives since the referendum. They said Tuesday that the Cabinet dismissals meant little by themselves, especially since neither man has been replaced.

“This move is supposed to be interpreted that Yeltsin is cleansing the government of anti-reformists, but in reality it is not so,” said Mikhail Berger, economics editor of the newspaper Izvestia. “Since the referendum, Yeltsin has succumbed to the temptation of a relaxed stance, strengthening subsidies for profitless industries and raising salaries of their workers.”

Sergei Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.