Outside Moscow, the Power Struggle Is Far From Over : Russia: In Bryansk, the conflict between Yeltsin’s appointed governor and the regional council worsens.

You could say that Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin kept his hold on this potato-heartland province thanks to a sneaky request for a late-night drink of water.

That is how special forces loyal to Yeltsin took over the government building here during his recent Moscow showdown with Parliament.

One sly soldier knocked and asked a police guard for something to drink, and when the gullible guard opened the door--whoops! A busload of masked invaders were on their way in.

It was a farcical moment. But there is nothing funny about the fierce resistance to Yeltsin and his reforms in Bryansk and dozens of provinces like it across Russia’s expanse.

The White House is conquered and the Russian Supreme Soviet disbanded, but the battle for power continues--outside Moscow.

“What would happen if a president came to power in America who made life one-third worse in just one or two years?” asked Vladimir Lavrenov, deputy chairman of the Bryansk region’s soviet, or council. “That’s what we’re talking about. I’m a representative of the people. How can I support such a president?”

To fight opponents such as Lavrenov, Yeltsin has ordered local and regional soviets across the country to disband. But the soviets are fighting back, and, judging by Bryansk, the conflict between Yeltsin’s appointed governors and the soviets is only worsening.

Last week, gathered before a portrait of V. I. Lenin nearly the size of a cinema screen, 124 deputies of the Bryansk regional soviet stolidly told Yeltsin to go to the devil with his call for their self-destruction.

When one pro-Yeltsin deputy got up and declared, “We should disband ourselves,” another snapped back, “You disband yourself if you want to!”

With an overwhelming majority clearly against resigning, a dozen or so Yeltsin backers simply walked out, leaving the soviet without a quorum.

That was the cue that Yeltsin’s appointed governor in Bryansk, Vladimir Karpov, needed.

He asserted that “the soviets have just outlived their time” and declared the council suspended.

Grumbling deputies, almost all of them middle-age men with combed-back Soviet-style hair, eventually went home but refused to disband.

“This doesn’t smell of democracy,” said one who was afraid to give his name. Lavrenov said that he will protest the decision and that it was clearly illegal.

Their defiance was typical; across Russia, only about 20 of the 88 regional soviets have stopped work, and only three of them voluntarily.

On Friday, Yeltsin decreed that elections must be held for most regional soviets by the end of March and that they must whittle themselves down to 50 members or fewer.

In Bryansk, a conservative-leaning province of 1.5 million about 230 miles southwest of Moscow that includes this nation’s biggest potato fields, the struggle for power in Russia boils down to two men locking horns.

One is a self-proclaimed Communist in a long black leather coat and orange socks tucked into black loafers. He is Yuri Lodkin, a former journalist who was elected governor earlier this year on a platform of low prices and state subsidies, which appealed to Bryansk’s struggling farmers.

The other is a progressive economist with kind blue eyes behind nerdy thick glasses who sighs as he lays down the law, as if it hurts to play tough. He is Karpov, Yeltsin’s handpicked successor to Lodkin.

Their battle began like this: When Yeltsin announced that he was dissolving the Supreme Soviet, the Bryansk regional council not only denounced him, it declared Bryansk a closed zone where Yeltsin’s decrees were invalid. Lodkin supported the council and left for Moscow to back up the Parliament there and help with negotiations.

In a striking indication of just how shallow Yeltsin’s support is in some places, Lodkin’s underlings in the governor’s administration also held a vote; only two abstained from condemning the Russian president’s move.

While Lodkin was in Moscow, Yeltsin issued a decree firing him and appointing one of the two abstainers--Karpov, Lodkin’s deputy governor--in his place.

When Karpov found that he could not report to work because Lodkin supporters and police were occupying the government building, he got the Interior Ministry in Moscow to order troops to take it.

They succeeded without bloodshed, and also peacefully ended a dispute over control of the local airwaves that amounted to a faint imitation of the deadly battle over the Ostankino station in Moscow.

But it could be said that at least the violence in the Russian capital appeared to settle things.

The Parliament lost, and deputies were forced into ignominious surrender as their building burned.

In Bryansk, and places like it, nothing feels decided. Karpov rules for now, but one more political twist and Lodkin could be back.

“All I know is that we should spend less time on politics and more time getting things done,” beet farmer Nikolai Timonov said. “We have children to feed.”

Lodkin has appealed Yeltsin’s decision to fire him, saying that the president had no right to oust an elected official.

Karpov may have to appeal to Yeltsin to take more forceful measures to disband the regional council.

And most ominously for Yeltsin, at the national parliamentary elections that he has called for Dec. 12, there is no reason to think that the Bryansks of Russia will have changed their minds about the conservative majority they elected last time.

The new federal Parliament could well turn out as recalcitrant as the old one, and local legislatures could end up just as hostile to governors like Karpov.

“In two months, there will be even more tension than now,” said Pyotr Shirshov, head of the Bryansk City Council. “The new (legislature) will speak once, and they’ll disband it right away.”

Lodkin, for one, is planning to run for the new Federation Council--the upper chamber of the federal Parliament--and his chances are good. When he ran for the Russian Parliament in 1990, he garnered 72% in a field of six candidates.

“In the provinces, Yeltsin will get the opposite of what he wanted in the makeup of Parliament,” Lodkin said. “After all this, I think my rating is higher than ever.”

Outside the soviets, much of the power in places such as Bryansk lies at the level of local officials who decide who gets a tractor during sowing season and who gets soldiers to help them at harvest time. And those people, said Pyotr Polonitsky, Karpov’s adviser, are mainly friends of Lodkin’s around here.

“In the countryside, when you need a horse or a tractor, you go to the collective farm chairman,” Polonitsky said. “And when he comes to the shack and says, ‘Maria Ivanovna, vote for Lodkin,’ you do. He tells you that you may only get a padded coat and a pair of galoshes from him, but at least they’re guaranteed.”

Karpov, whom Polonitsky described as “more of a liberal than a democrat,” has already begun dismantling some of what he calls Lodkin’s populist programs.

The price of bread more than doubled last week here, and Karpov is trying to bring in the kind of fiscal restraint that Yeltsin’s reformist economists push.

The Lodkin camp says it is the fault of Yeltsin’s reforms that production in the Bryansk region has dropped 23% in the last nine months.

Bryansk did everything Moscow ordered, Lavrenov said, “but our effectiveness wasn’t just zero, it was negative.”

In the airy office he now occupies, Karpov said he would continue trying to seek compromises with the pro-Lodkin, anti-Yeltsin camp. But “I can’t cooperate with frenzied, violent, rabid . . ,” he trailed off.

He asserted that the anti-Yeltsin mood in Bryansk province is typical of only a few Russian regions.

But Lodkin confidently claimed the opposite, that except for a few regions and the biggest metropolises, “Russia is all like this.”