Former Top Russian Official Blames ‘Immoral Power’ for Nation’s Crisis : Politics: Alexei Kazannik, who gave up his post as prosecutor general, says Yeltsin is manipulated by his top aides.

Maybe Alexei Kazannik was naive. Maybe the Russian press is right to dub him a Don Quixote.

But in a turbulent land without much of a moral compass, Kazannik is one of the few public figures to distinguish loudly between right and wrong.

Kazannik has slammed the door on the Kremlin halls of power, giving up his job as Russia’s prosecutor general to return home to Siberia.

“The reason for Russia’s crisis is ineffective and immoral power on all levels,” Kazannik said in a recent interview.

That is the usual rhetoric. What is unusual is that he was so outraged that he went on to give details of the ineffectiveness and immorality he had seen in the Kremlin.

Kazannik said President Boris N. Yeltsin is manipulated by his top aides and that Yeltsin just “serves the interests of a narrow corporative group”--or what in Russian politics is known as his “circle,” an entourage of aides and advisers who were chosen largely for their personal loyalty.

In Yeltsin’s just-released book, titled “The Struggle for Russia” in its U.S. edition, he admits to chronic trouble with friends, advisers and the mechanics of making his administration run.

But Kazannik went much further, saying that the men around Yeltsin take the approach that “we can do anything,” regardless of the law and the constitution.

He alleged, without going into detail, that they are also enriching themselves through their influence on the president.

“I can only say the president is weak--he can’t stand off bad advice and pressure,” he said.

Kazannik’s moral clash with Yeltsin was inevitable.

It came in February, when Parliament issued an amnesty letting all Yeltsin’s worst political enemies out of jail and off the hook for their rebellion against him last October.

Kazannik did not like the amnesty, but he could see that it was constitutional, and he ordered the men released.

The displeasure from Yeltsin’s circle was so great that Kazannik, unwilling to back down, quit his job and gave up a palatial Moscow apartment in the same building as the president.

He returned home to Omsk, to his old job as a university law professor at one-fifth his Moscow salary and to his book-lined apartment looking out on a chemical plant and a prison camp.

The prosecutor general’s rejection of Yeltsin packs special impact because of how Kazannik first gained political fame.

In 1989, when Communists had deprived Yeltsin of a seat in the new Soviet legislature, Kazannik admired him enough to give his own spot to him, a dramatic gesture that helped Yeltsin in his rise to power.

Kazannik’s transformation also reflects the general trend in Russian society: The people who gave Yeltsin a solid majority in his presidential run in 1991 now accord him a 19% approval rating--his lowest ever--according to a recent national poll.

Kazannik, with his straight gaze and distinctive black-and-white beard, has turned from being Yeltsin’s supporter into an accuser willing to reveal what he knows of the inner workings of the president’s administration.

Speaking in his Omsk apartment, he said that if not for the amnesty, his office’s investigation of the October rebellion in Moscow would almost surely have ended in charges against both the anti-Yeltsin rebels and the Kremlin officials who ordered the shelling and storming of the White House.

Given two or three more weeks to dig, he said, his team of investigators would almost surely have proven that the storming of the White House could have been avoided if the rebels had been offered a new chance to surrender or to continue talks.

He believes that top Kremlin officials could have been charged with abuse of power and that the soldiers who killed some of the 147 victims could have been charged for obeying orders to shoot to kill.

This is clearly not the kind of legal chief Yeltsin wanted after the trauma of the White House fight.

Kazannik said some people had warned him that if he tried to bring charges against top officials, “they’ll remove you physically.”

Soon after he took the prosecutor general’s job, Kazannik received an unsigned note from the Kremlin on how to run the October attempted coup case.

He recalled that it read like this: “No political trials, no specially created investigative brigade, appoint a few investigators, do the investigation within 10 days and bring charges against everyone on Article 102 and 102-17”--murder and serving as an accomplice to murder.

“The case then goes to the military court, and in three days all are to be sentenced to execution,” the note read, according to Kazannik.

He said he believed at first that some crazy person had written it but later came to understand that it had been a Yeltsin aide.

One of Kazannik’s most ominous topics is the influence on Yeltsin of Alexander Korzhakov.

Yeltsin’s longtime bodyguard, Korzhakov is such a close and proven friend that he appears able to influence Yeltsin deeply on a variety of matters.

“Korzhakov is a very limited person, with a weak education, but he can get Yeltsin to sign any decree,” Kazannik said. “Everyone in the administration knows and says that if Korzhakov wants, he can prepare a draft decree that Yeltsin is resigning because of his health, and Yeltsin, not reading it, will sign it--and only in a few days will he find out he decreed his own retirement.”

Kazannik’s model of the Kremlin workings might partly explain some peculiar decrees that have come from there. Recent scandals have erupted over a decree misworded to make it sound like Russia planned military bases in the Baltics and over special privileges for a luxurious sports center to be run partly by a presidential friend.

For Kazannik, the problem was not only with Yeltsin’s aides but also with the president himself and a general disregard for the law.

When Parliament issued the amnesty, Yeltsin countered with a decree ordering top officials to interpret it as illegal and ignore it.

Kazannik, appalled because he could see that the amnesty was legal, called Yeltsin and asked him to withdraw the decree.

“He very angrily said, ‘ Nyet ,’ ” Kazannik recalled, “and I said, ‘Boris Nikolayevich, you’re consciously violating the constitution,’ and he again said simply, ‘ Nyet .’ Then I said, ‘Accept my resignation, because I can’t fulfill your order.’ And he said, ‘ Nyet . Find a way out, but don’t carry out the amnesty.’ ”

After Kazannik ordered the amnesty and resigned, one of his deputies told him of being summoned to the Kremlin and offered the newly vacated job--on the condition that he would take back the amnesty and rearrest those who had already been released. The deputy refused, Kazannik said.

Kazannik offers a dozen other examples of dirty politics inside the Kremlin.

There was the request that he find evidence that Valery D. Zorkin, then chairman of the Constitutional Court, had committed a crime.

And there was the time he was offered a luxurious government dacha-- only to find out that it had last belonged to one of the rebels he had recently arrested.

“I arrested the person and I’m supposed to live in his dacha ?” Kazannik asked, appalled that the officials who offered him the house did not even sense the impropriety.

“I’m amazed at how this administration breaks people,” Kazannik said of the widespread distribution of perks that soon become habit-forming. “Some it buys with apartments and cars, some fall into a situation in which they compromise themselves.”

After his hard look at how the political machine runs, Kazannik reached the conclusion that Russia is headed toward dictatorship.

“The sources of power are subordinated directly to the president, and the president and his team have shown that for them, ‘The law is very loose, it can be bent any way it suits you,’ ” Kazannik said, quoting an old saying summing up traditional Russian disrespect for the law.

He questioned whether presidential elections will be allowed to go ahead as planned in 1996.

Back in Omsk, Kazannik is working on setting up his own party, to be known as the Party of National Conscience, to compete in the 1996 elections if they occur.

Siberians are different from Muscovites, he said, and support the idea of a party to fight for basic honesty and morality.

Two volunteer bodyguards block the many visitors who come to the five-story walk-up where Kazannik lives, and letters often reach him addressed simply to “Omsk, Kazannik.”

Kazannik, born in Ukraine, said he developed “a terrible hatred of lies” as he was growing up and hearing teachers claim that Soviet children lived better than anyone else in the world--even as some of his schoolmates were literally starving to death.

He is somewhat insulted when people call him a Don Quixote, seeing himself as more of a realist.

“If I didn’t believe in the possibility of transforming society and transforming the government, it wouldn’t be worth living,” he said.