Russia’s Reformists Agree to Disagree

President Boris N. Yeltsin’s courtship of his leading democratic rival, the hottest romance of this Russian election season, has ended in disarray, with each party spreading dirty secrets about their intimate conversations.

As a result of Grigory A. Yavlinsky’s snub of his suitor, the pro-reform camp will go divided into the June 16 presidential election, strengthening the Communist Party’s bid to recapture the Kremlin.

“Today the democratic opposition cannot consider Yeltsin to be a democratic politician,” Yavlinsky told reporters Saturday in a recap of their ill-starred, three-week affair.

The pair met three times in search of a compromise that might join them against Communist leader Gennady A. Zyuganov, who is locked in a close race with Yeltsin for first place in the presidential race. Most opinion surveys give them 25% to 30% support each in the 11-candidate field.

But Yeltsin refused to meet Yavlinsky’s all-too-public conditions for dropping out of the race, so the challenger told a campaign rally in Novgorod on Friday that he would not be seeing the president again.

“I couldn’t even manage to talk my own wife into voting for him,” Yavlinsky declared.

The liberal economist said he and his reform movement, Yabloko, will keep waging their own campaign.

Other leading democrats have swallowed their distaste for Yeltsin’s authoritarian rule and accepted the incumbent as the only candidate able to stop what they view as the worse evil of a President Zyuganov.

But Yavlinsky, a darling of big-city intellectuals who ranks third in most polls with about 10% support, remained the elusive holdout.

A Kremlin political advisor, Georgi A. Satarov, said the failure of the coalition to take shape means Yeltsin has lost any chance of winning an absolute majority on June 16 and avoiding a runoff with Zyuganov.

“It increases the risk of [Yeltsin’s] losing the election,” he added.

Considering the size of each man’s ego, a Yeltsin-Yavlinsky alliance was always a longshot. But Yeltsin’s unusually vigorous pursuit of a deal, along with some tit-for-tat leaks of their closed-door bargaining, made it a dramatic subplot of the campaign.

From the outset, Yavlinsky set sweeping conditions for joining Yeltsin: limits on presidential power; an end of the war in the rebel republic of Chechnya; the firing of Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin and three other Cabinet officials; and the adoption, virtually word for word, of Yavlinsky’s economic platform, which calls for breaking up monopolies and raising taxes on oil companies.

After insisting for three weeks that compromise was possible, Yeltsin last week ruled out any wholesale shifts in personnel.

“His reaction was not totally unexpected,” Yavlinsky said Saturday. “This indicates the entire policy he is pursuing today will remain unchanged.”

While Yavlinsky offered that bland conclusion, sources in his camp drew a more revealing picture of Yeltsin’s effort to woo the economist.

They said Yeltsin, after refusing to touch the Cabinet officers on Yavlinsky’s hit list, offered instead to fire Economics Minister Yevgeny G. Yasin.

“But Yasin is about the only decent person in the government,” Yavlinsky was heard to reply.

“OK!” Yeltsin reportedly exclaimed. “See, we are finding mutual understanding! We are making progress! We have agreed not to remove Yasin.”

At another point, Yeltsin said he was “thinking of forming a grand alliance” that would include not only Yavlinsky and two relatively moderate presidential rivals but also Zyuganov and neo-fascist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, one source said.

“My aides tell me it is possible to strike an alliance with Zyuganov. And even Zhirinovsky,” the source quoted Yeltsin as saying.

The leak of Yeltsin’s musings about a deal with his most extremist foes was meant to hit back at the president for announcing that Yavlinsky had privately demanded the prime minister’s job in exchange for his support.

Yeltsin, in remarks to supporters a week ago, said Yavlinsky was asking “too much” and had rejected his counteroffer to make him deputy prime minister in charge of economic reform. “His pride won’t let him accept the offer,” Yeltsin said.

Yavlinsky denied again Saturday that he had asked for, or been offered, a government post.

Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.