Profile : A Reformist Alternative to Yeltsin : Economist Grigory Yavlinsky, the liberals’ choice, outpolls the Russian leader in popularity.

President Boris N. Yeltsin, never a modest man, once remarked that there was no alternative to Yeltsin.

Now there are several.

Presenting Grigory Yavlinsky, a 41-year-old economist with a mass of curly dark hair, a quick wit in both Russian and English and a popularity rating higher than Yeltsin’s. He has so much faith in the free market and individual enterprise that he sometimes sounds like a Russian Jack Kemp.

“If you are elected president, what would you do about people who expect the state to take care of them whether they work or not?” an interviewer asked Yavlinsky last spring.

No free lunches, Yavlinsky replied. “I would give everybody the right to do what he can do for himself.”

Even before tanks turned the Parliament building into a smoldering hulk, Yavlinsky was, at least in Moscow intellectual circles, hot.

Now that the Parliament is in ashes, the constitution in tatters, the Constitutional Court forbidden to convene, the leaders of the anti-Yeltsin rebellion in prison, Communist and nationalist newspapers banned and Moscow under military rule, Yavlinsky and other young reformers may find it easier to challenge Yeltsin as the sole heir to Russia’s democracy movement.

It’s not that the liberals criticize Yeltsin’s use of force to crush the armed rebellion by parliamentary leaders and their Communist and nationalist backers. In Russian politics--where compromise is usually viewed as a sign of weakness, and weakness is a mortal sin--Yeltsin’s democratic allies faulted him for failing to quash the revolt more surely.

At a press conference two days after tanks fired on the Parliament building, the Rev. Gleb Yakunin, a former Soviet dissident and a leader of the Democratic Russia party, called Yeltsin’s victory a miracle because the defense against the “new coupsters . . . was so inept that it could not have been handled worse if one tried.”

When the choice was between Yeltsin on one side and the Communists, ultranationalists and anti-Semites on the other, Democratic Russia could do nothing but support Yeltsin, added lawmaker Anatoly Y. Shabad. Now that the hard-liners have seemingly been vanquished, Shabad said, loyal opposition is possible.

“We have an opportunity to create a normal political opposition to the president,” Shabad said.

Most Russians remain in shock from the spectacle of tanks and snipers shooting up the streets of their capital in the worst political violence since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

But behind the scenes, Russia’s politicians are already maneuvering to determine the alliances that will shape the parliamentary elections scheduled for December and the presidential election slated for June 12, 1994.

“The pro-presidential bloc is going to split,” said Alexei L. Golovkov, director of the Economic Reform Center and a close ally of First Deputy Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar.

Exactly how those divisions will occur, as well as which faction Yavlinsky might join, remains unclear amid Russia’s swirling and dangerous political landscape.

But it is already apparent that Yavlinsky is a rising political star who will try to use the December parliamentary elections as a springboard to the presidency.

“Yavlinsky is a very strong figure,” Golovkov said. “The question is, who is going to support him, and how? . . . Running for Parliament is a very convenient way to create an image that will later help him run for president.”

An aide said last week that Yavlinsky has not decided whether to run for Parliament--but that even if he ran and won, he would in no way be precluded from running for president next spring.

Yavlinsky is best known as the author of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s 1990 “500-day plan” to reform the Soviet economy. He quit his post as Russian deputy prime minister after 95 days when it became clear that Gorbachev and the Soviet central government would not implement his radical free-market ideas.

The resignation gave Yavlinsky, a boxing enthusiast who once called himself “obstinate by nature,” an enduring reputation for intellectual integrity.

Now the head of a Moscow think tank, Yavlinsky announced in late June that he would be a candidate for president--though at the time, elections were not scheduled until June, 1996, and Yeltsin had announced he would not seek another term.

In August, an opinion poll that found Yavlinsky more popular than both Yeltsin and then-Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi set the political world on its ear.

The Mnenie poll service asked Russians, “To what extent do you trust our political leaders?” Of the 1,024 people surveyed, 33% said they trusted Yavlinsky, compared with 25% for Yeltsin, 21% for Rutskoi and 19% for Gaidar and for another rising political star, Deputy Prime Minister Sergei M. Shakhrai.

Only 20% said they distrusted Yavlinsky, compared with 33% who said the same thing about Shakhrai, 40% about Rutskoi and 44% about Yeltsin and Gaidar.

Yavlinsky turned out to be the only politician in the poll whose positive ratings outweighed his negatives, the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported.

Some analysts question the poll’s methodology and accuracy. Whatever its failings, it certainly shows that two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians continue to mistrust their government--and that the door is wide open to newcomers.

“Yavlinsky bears responsibility neither for the disintegration of the (Soviet) Union nor for the ongoing economic crisis,” wrote the influential Moscow News, lauding the economist’s independence, competence and pristine reputation.

“The fact that his name has been associated with the bloc Entrepreneurs for New Russia for some time speaks not so much about his political sympathies as about the acumen of those businessmen who were the first to discern a potential Russian president in him.”

Others, however, say that Yavlinsky will never be president because his name sounds Jewish. That alone is enough to disqualify him from Russia’s highest office in the eyes of many here.

“They will wonder why his name is not Ivanov,” said Vladimir Mukusev, a democratic lawmaker who is full of praise for Yavlinsky but said he thinks that anti-Semitism and Russian nationalism will keep him from rising higher than prime minister. “A Russian must be czar.”

Yavlinsky was born in the western Ukrainian city of Lvov to a college teacher mother and a soldier father. A promising student, he suddenly dropped out of school at 15 and went to work as a plumber.

But Yavlinsky returned to school and graduated from the prestigious Plekhanov Institute for managers, working first in the coal industry and then at the Labor Research Institute and the U.S.S.R. State Committee for Labor and Employment.

In 1982, he had a brush with political disaster when he published a book that declared Leonid I. Brezhnev’s vaunted economic reforms of 1979 a failure.

“The entire circulation of the book was destroyed, and the manuscript was taken away from me,” Yavlinsky said. Only Brezhnev’s death in 1982 ended the affair.

But as the Soviet economy foundered, Yavlinsky’s ideas caught Gorbachev’s eye, and he was called upon to write the 500-day recovery plan with economists Graham Allison of Harvard University and Stanislav Shatalin.

The plan sought to bring the Soviet Union from communism to a market economy, complete with unregulated prices and private property, by 1997. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yavlinsky tried to put those ideas into practice as a consultant to the city of Nizhny Novgorod.

Once a closed city dominated by military industry, Nizhny Novgorod has become a showcase for privatization, entrepreneurship and free-market reform. Its transformation, chronicled in a Yavlinsky book titled “Nizhny Novgorod Prologue,” is likely to be the economist’s answer to those who ask about his economic program for Russia.

At a press conference late last month, Yavlinsky outlined a three-point platform more ambitious than Yeltsin’s free-market reforms. First, he favors a federation of Russian regions that would be free, democratic and, “for the first time in history, not based on force.”

Second, Yavlinsky wants private property, strongly protected by the state, without which he believes true economic reform is impossible.

Finally, he said, Russians’ money must have real value--something Russia’s Central Bank has failed to provide. Yavlinsky called for the establishment of “the ruble as a hard currency, a convertible, workable, real national currency in Russia.”

Yavlinsky opposes any form of price control on principle and believes Yeltsin’s privatization program does not go nearly far enough toward creating real owners of industry. He has said that checking inflation and keeping Russia’s regions from straying are the government’s key tasks.

But the real difference between Yavlinsky and Yeltsin may be more one of style than of ideology. Especially after Yeltsin’s bloody showdown with the Parliament, some may see a younger man with more democratic methods as a better bet than Yeltsin, whose autocratic style was forged during 30 years as a party boss.

Even if Russians aren’t inclined to part with Boris Yeltsin--or to pick a radical as his successor should Yeltsin choose not to run--Yavlinsky’s challenge is likely to have far-reaching political resonance.

“Russia is not an underdeveloped country,” he once said. “We have been developing in the wrong direction.”

He added, “This country needs to be built anew, not reformed.”

Biography

* Name: Grigory A. Yavlinsky

* Title: Economist.

* Age: 41

* Personal: Born in Lvov, Ukraine to a college teacher and a soldier. Dropped out of school at 15. Graduated from Plekhanov Institute for managers. Wrote banned book criticizing Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev’s economic reforms in 1982. Authored President Gorbachev’s 500-day plan to reform economy; never implemented. Has wife, Yelena, and two sons.

* Quote: “This country needs to be built anew, not reformed.”