Yeltsin Lies Low as Russia Reels

President Boris N. Yeltsin, increasingly isolated and under pressure to resign, remained secluded as the Russian stock market plunged Thursday to a record low and government negotiators hammered out a power-sharing agreement designed to reduce his authority.

Longtime Yeltsin supporters said the president is so politically weakened that he may be unable to survive the collapse of the ruble, the fall of the stock market and the economic chaos that grips the country.

“Yeltsin was never such a weak player as he is these days,” said Vyacheslav A. Nikonov, a former presidential advisor. “Yeltsin is not in public view. It raises the question of who is in charge.”

Nikonov and others said part of the proposed power-sharing pact with parliament is an agreement to grant Yeltsin immunity from future legal action and to ensure the financial security of his family, measures designed to protect him if he resigns.

The Kremlin denied reports that Yeltsin, tenacious but ailing, would quit. But that did nothing to halt speculation that the 67-year-old president is likely to resign before year’s end, prompting a presidential election early next year.

“It is clear that his physical and mental performance is deteriorating every day,” analyst Andrei Piontkovsky said. “My perception is that he is politically finished.”

Yeltsin arrived at the Kremlin this morning after spending the first part of the tumultuous week holed up at his rural estate outside Moscow, Itar-Tass news agency said. He had been scheduled to meet with visiting Bulgarian President Petar Stoyanov later in the morning.

Yeltsin’s latest career-threatening crisis comes as his government searches helplessly for a way to halt the collapse of the economy. The stock market Thursday dropped by a one-day record 17.1% on the Russian Trading System to 63.2, the lowest level since the index was created three years ago. The index was at 500 a year ago.

To slow the free fall of the ruble, the Central Bank halted all institutional currency trading indefinitely and set the ruble’s value artificially at 7.86 to the dollar for the third day in a row.

At exchange booths around Moscow, however, the ruble was trading at more than 10 to the dollar--for anyone foolish enough to part with dollars. For those with rubles, it was almost impossible to find dollars for sale. Shopkeepers were quickly raising prices, ostensibly to compensate for the falling value of the ruble--though in many cases the prices ended up even higher than before in real terms.

As bank depositors across the country tried to withdraw savings in dollars or rubles before an expected banking collapse, the Central Bank initiated state takeover of the SBS-Agro banking group because of its inability to pay back a $100-million government loan. SBS-Agro reportedly has 25 million depositors, more than any other private Russian bank.

Yeltsin’s economic and political crisis comes on the eve of next week’s long-awaited summit in Moscow with another wounded president: Bill Clinton. While the United States had hoped the talks would speed up nuclear disarmament and focus attention on the conflict in the Serbian province of Kosovo in Yugoslavia, the meetings now are unlikely to produce any substantial agreements.

“I don’t know what Clinton plans to discuss with him,” Piontkovsky said. “They may talk only about Monica Lewinsky’s dress.”

In Washington, National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger said it remains “appropriate” for the summit to go forward despite Russia’s economic crisis. “But obviously, this comes at a time in which the Russian government is very much occupied by forming a government and dealing with its economic crisis,” he said.

U.S. officials declined to say whether Washington was preparing to call a meeting of the Group of 7--the United States and the six other major industrial powers--to consider what additional steps to take.

Clinton may have the most productive sessions with acting Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, whom Yeltsin fired in March but called back this week in the hope that he could end the crisis.

Chernomyrdin, 60, a former Soviet boss who served as Yeltsin’s prime minister for five years, must win confirmation from the Communist-dominated Duma, the lower house of parliament, in a vote scheduled for Monday.

To that end, he has hinted at the possibility of including Communists in his Cabinet and has been negotiating the power-sharing agreement with Yeltsin’s opponents in the Duma.

Under the proposal, the Duma would gain certain long-term powers: The president’s appointment of Cabinet ministers as well as his dismissal of a prime minister would have to be confirmed by the Duma; the president would refrain from issuing decrees on economic issues and would agree that the Cabinet is accountable to the Duma.

Such a proposal would reverse provisions of the 1993 Constitution, written by Yeltsin and imposed on parliament, which gave the president predominate political power.

In exchange, Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin would gain some short-term advantages: The Duma would agree to confirm Chernomyrdin as prime minister; it would agree to a moratorium on no-confidence votes against Yeltsin’s government and impeachment proceedings against the president; and it would pass a law granting “social guarantees” of immunity and financial security to Yeltsin and his family when he leaves office.

The “social guarantees” were supposed to remain secret after they were proposed Thursday in a meeting between Yeltsin spokesman Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky and Communist Party leader Gennady A. Zyuganov. But within an hour, Zyuganov went public with news of the proposal. Later in the day, it was Yastrzhembsky who issued the Kremlin’s denials that Yeltsin intended to resign. “No resignation has been on the agenda,” he told reporters. “Let’s calm down and take up real problems.”

The Duma is scheduled to consider the power-sharing proposal today, but negotiators still had not reached agreement late Thursday night because both sides believed they were giving up too much.

“The president’s side believes that our draft agreement is way too radical, and the left-wing opposition says it is not radical enough,” said moderate lawmaker Oleg Morozov, the Duma’s chief negotiator on the issue.

Over the years, Yeltsin has survived other major crises: a standoff in 1991 with rebellious troops outside the Russian White House in Moscow, four months before the Soviet Union collapsed; a clash with parliament in 1993 in which his troops shelled the same building; heart attacks in 1995 and just before he won reelection in 1996.

While he would sometimes disappear from view for days or months at a time, he usually has come back strong, fired a few underlings and demonstrated that he is still in charge.

Since sacking Prime Minister Sergei V. Kiriyenko on Sunday and replacing him with Chernomyrdin, the unpredictable president remained out of sight until this morning, fueling speculation that he is again ill.

“One can imagine it’s just another crisis Yeltsin will be able to overcome, but I think the situation is more serious than usual,” said Andrei V. Kortunov, a historian and political analyst. “He should act decisively to demonstrate that he is still in control. If he doesn’t in the next couple of days, that would mean it [the resignation] is a done deal and he is a political corpse.”

If Yeltsin resigns, the prime minister would become acting president and would be required to call elections that would take place within three months.

For Chernomyrdin, the timing of a presidential resignation would be crucial. Assuming he wins confirmation as prime minister, he would need two or three months to consolidate his power. But if Yeltsin were to wait, it could give Chernomyrdin’s rivals time to catch up.

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren in Washington and Art Pine in Edgartown, Mass., contributed to this report.