Yeltsin’s Nominee for Premier Snubbed Again

After Russia’s ornery lawmakers rejected Sergei V. Kiriyenko for the post of prime minister for the second time in a week Friday, those taken with the congenial, young, acting-government chief might have been wondering, “What’s not to like?”

Kiriyenko’s credentials as a self-made success in the oil and banking industries should impress the most ardent of reformers. His former activism in Communist Party youth groups and his description of himself as “a Soviet man” would seem to appeal to Russia’s legions of nostalgic leftists.

The 35-year-old’s penchant for Japanese martial arts and his affinity for the music of Whitney Houston portray a cosmopolitan figure interested in the cultures of both East and West.

And his homey pastimes of baking pastries and roughhousing with his two school-age children show a more sensitive figure from the male power structure that one would assume is attractive to Russian women.

But among the tough-guy Communists and nationalists who dominate the state Duma, the lower house of parliament, the soft-spoken, bespectacled Kiriyenko is regarded as something of a nerd. And that image likely contributed to the 450-member Duma’s two refusals to confirm him.

Lawmakers voted 186-143 against Kiriyenko on April 10, and support dropped to 115 for him and 271 opposed Friday.

Still, in the final count set for next Friday, what Duma deputies think about Kiriyenko’s qualities as a Cabinet leader and as a man will probably weigh little in comparison with the power of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin to insist and the deputies’ own desires for self-preservation.

The Russian Constitution--a document largely written by Yeltsin that creates a nearly omnipotent presidency--obliges the head of state to disband parliament if it votes against a nominated prime minister three times. That makes the first and second votes little more than soapbox sessions for Yeltsin opponents to air empty complaints about the man who would be next in line to the often-ailing president.

“The deputies have no serious objections to Kiriyenko himself,” acting Deputy Prime Minister Boris Y. Nemtsov observed after the failed confirmation of his protege-turned-boss. “They simply do not want to hear what Kiriyenko is telling them, and they do it out of political considerations.”

Yeltsin immediately renominated Kiriyenko after the Duma ballot, and Nemtsov and other Kremlin insiders were predicting success on the third try next Friday.

Lawmakers will then be confronted with the choice of endorsing Kiriyenko or being thrown out of office and compelled to run costly reelection campaigns at a time when apathy is cutting into support for all political forces.

Even in the unlikely event that Duma deputies decide to face early elections, Yeltsin would retain his young nominee in an acting capacity in the interim, allowing Kiriyenko to persevere for months with his quiet campaigns to clear government wage debts and get Russia’s idle industries working.

The aging stalwarts of the Communist Party complain that Kiriyenko lacks the experience to run the government.

But his career spans both the Soviet and reform eras, and his let’s-talk-about-it manner leaves an impression of a man capable of working with all sides.

In a folksy television interview from his country dacha broadcast last weekend, Kiriyenko claimed to have taken the most professional pleasure in a blue-collar shipyard job he held in the 1980s.

“You leave home at 7 a.m. and come together with others going to work. As you approach the plant, you blend into a stream of people, a huge crowd walking shoulder to shoulder . . . that gives you a feeling of being part of a great project,” he recalled with fondness, evoking memories of proletarian solidarity shared by many older Russians.

Even his middle name, which for any Russian derives from the name of one’s father, reflects his family’s patriotic fervor: Vladilen--short for Soviet founder Vladimir I. Lenin.

Kiriyenko worked at the submarine-building enterprise after graduating from the Gorky Institute of Water Transport Engineering in the city now called Nizhny Novgorod, where he later plunged into the new world of market economics by founding a bank and eventually became acquainted with the rising political star, Nemtsov.

It was Nemtsov who brought Kiriyenko to Moscow to serve as deputy fuel and energy minister a year ago, after a brief stint as head of Russia’s huge Norsi oil refinery.

Nemtsov is often regarded as Yeltsin’s favored heir apparent, and the elevation of Kiriyenko above him would conform well with Yeltsin’s suspected plan for keeping a low-profile figure in the high-risk political foreground of the prime minister post while grooming his real understudy in the shadows.

Yeltsin, who suffers heart and respiratory ailments and at 67 has already lived almost a decade longer than average Russian male life expectancy, sacked his last prime minister, Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, when he became too ambitious.

In contrast, Kiriyenko has cast himself as a humble public servant willing to take on the tasks of running the government while Yeltsin and his ideological allies thrash out a plan for positioning a viable presidential candidate to inherit the real power baton.

Meanwhile, the man who met his wife in the ninth grade and ranks boiled potatoes as his favorite food will continue to fine-tune economic reforms and perfect his recipes for flaky pastries.