Russia Cabinet Fends Off Predictions It’ll Abandon Tight Money, Reforms : Economy: Assertions come in the face of international alarm that personnel changes presage shift away from radical moves of last two years.

Russia’s new Cabinet, fending off predictions that it will try to run the country Soviet-style, maintained Monday that it will stick to free-market reforms and tight spending.

“The tough financial policy will not be eased to any degree,” Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin said. “Nobody has changed the program of reforms.”

Alexander N. Shokhin, the new economics minister, told reporters, “There’s no basis for the agitation in the media that the government’s policy and the government’s composition have altered.”

The Cabinet assertions came in the face of international alarm that the resignation of reform architect Yegor T. Gaidar and the possible departure of Boris G. Fyodorov, the tightfisted finance minister, presage a shift away from the radical reforms of the last two years.

Chernomyrdin is pushing for increased subsidies to industry and agriculture to boost plummeting production, while the Gaidar camp complains that freer spending will bring to naught all attempts to control inflation.

Although it is based on economic figures, the battle over the free-market reforms increasingly appears to be political.

Shokhin complained that Gaidar’s supporters were purposely besmirching the government to discredit it in a “serious political game” aimed at “organizing a nationwide political strike in April or May, overthrowing the government and taking power.”

In a reminder of the hopeless economic confusion that reigned under Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Russian government is now planning to work out plans for the reforms’ continuation in a competition among various teams of economists.

Shokhin said that the teams, which include groups headed by Gorbachev-era economists Leonid Abalkin, Nikolai Petrakov and Stanislav Shatalin, will present their plans to the government in February and that the government will “generalize” them into one program.

Abalkin and Petrakov “are the most worrisome factor,” said economist Pavel Bunich. “They are inclined to reverse the movement of the entire economy.”

Shokhin, a former Gaidar ally who has shifted toward somewhat less radical reform, explained that when the new Cabinet talks about “non-monetarist” methods of improving the economy, it does not mean a return to the Soviet style of running the country by fiat with set wages, fixed prices and state-run supply networks.

Instead, he said, it means focusing more on ways to back up budget cuts with financial discipline--by improving tax collection and making sure that government money for industry and agriculture reaches its targets instead of ending up in factories’ foreign bank accounts.

“We must dramatically increase the revenues coming into the treasury, perhaps even by resorting to administrative methods--that is, to order all enterprises to report all their accounts, including overseas accounts, in filing their tax declarations,” Shokhin said.

He also noted that 1994 is likely to be the year when Russia’s 5 million “hidden unemployed”--people on unpaid vacations and shortened workweeks at troubled businesses--become real unemployed and that the government has to be prepared to spend what it takes to avoid a “social explosion.”

The Cabinet, and President Boris N. Yeltsin as well, became more willing to dilute the reforms after the Dec. 12 elections, in which Russians’ economic hardship translated into far more votes for ultranationalist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky’s party than for Gaidar’s reformers.

Yeltsin met with Chernomyrdin on Monday for talks that reportedly dealt with the still-pending government budget for 1994. The Russian president had also been expected to meet with Fyodorov to discuss his resignation, but the meeting apparently never happened.

Fyodorov has said he will stay in the government only if a Communist deputy prime minister and the head of Russia’s Central Bank are removed. Yeltsin has not agreed to his conditions but has also seemed to reject Fyodorov’s resignation.

Gaidar resigned Jan. 16, complaining that he was being held responsible for the economy while being denied the power to carry out his policies. The Russian government’s two top Western advisers, economists Jeffrey Sachs and Anders Aslund, also quit last week, saying they could not work with the new Old Guard.

But in Washington on Monday, the Clinton Administration’s top Russia expert urged “patience and steadiness” in U.S. policies toward the reform movement, the Associated Press reported.

“Many in the West are concerned that what has sometimes been called the second Russian Revolution has failed and that counterrevolution has set in,” Strobe Talbott, special adviser to the secretary of state on the former Soviet republics, told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee.