As Reform Falters, U.S. May Shift Focus to Ex-Soviet States : Russia: Departure of reformers from Cabinet is viewed as serious. Treasury Secretary Bentsen encourages Moscow to stay the course.

The United States may turn its attention away from Russia and more toward other former Soviet republics, senior U.S. officials said Sunday as they expressed discouragement over the departure of economic reformers from the new Cabinet of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin.

Such a shift would make Yeltsin’s task of redrawing the Russian economy into a free-market system more difficult after 70 years of Communist rule, but it would underscore how seriously the United States views the realignment taking place in Moscow.

The officials, traveling with Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen on his return from a 12-day visit to Russia and Asia, had been notably upbeat as they left Moscow eight days earlier at the end of President Clinton’s meetings with Yeltsin.

But the departures of Deputy Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar and Finance Minister Boris G. Fyodorov have left them deeply disappointed and uncertain about the course that Yeltsin’s government will follow.

The shake-up occurred after nationalists and others seeking to slow down, or reverse, the redesign of the Russian economic system strengthened their hands after parliamentary elections Dec. 12.

In a written statement issued Saturday night, Bentsen encouraged Russia to remain on the reform course.

“Russia’s economic future depends on the vigor with which it implements President Yeltsin’s commitment to reform,” he said. “I am troubled by some of the indications we are getting out of Russia. There is no way to have a healthy economy without controlling inflation, and no way to slow inflation without controlling budget deficits and credit growth.”

The statement goes to the heart of the differences over the course that Russia should take: The United States and others advocating “shock therapy” are pressing Yeltsin to rein in those who would continue pumping out rubles to support failing, inefficient industries unable to survive without costly government support that is fueling inflation.

Bentsen pointed out in his statement that the support offered to Russia by the international financial institutions “will depend on Russia taking credible measures to reduce inflation.”

In Moscow, there were signs over the weekend that the message is getting through.

Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, who shaped the new Cabinet, met Saturday with Fyodorov and urged him to stay as finance minister. Fyodorov continued to insist on greater power to block inflationary government spending--a condition Chernomyrdin has refused--and said he would press his cause in a meeting with Yeltsin this week.

As his spokesman rejected “the mechanical transfer of Western economic methods to Russian soil,” Chernomyrdin also telephoned Russia’s representative at the International Monetary Fund in Washington to press for an IMF mission to Moscow soon.

Russia is counting on the IMF and the World Bank for loans and grants. The United States is committed to a two-year aid program valued at $4.1 billion.

But any slackening in the plan to bring down inflation and impose strict standards on the economy to keep the privatization program on course will cause the IMF to retreat, a senior U.S. official said.

“Chernomyrdin is in a panic,” said Swedish economist Anders Aslund, who resigned Friday as an adviser to the Russian government. “He realizes that all this Western money may dry up” unless reformers stay.

Another likely result of the reformers’ departure, an official traveling with Bentsen said, would be a new attention on the former republics, which have complained that they are getting short shrift and are concerned that Russia will get too strong.

Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux in Moscow contributed to this report.