Yeltsin Rises From Sickbed to Clean House

In an effort to tighten his slipping grip on power, President Boris N. Yeltsin left his sickbed for three hours Monday, purged one of his few remaining longtime loyalists and then checked back into the hospital.

The victim was Chief of Staff Valentin B. Yumashev, a former journalist from Yeltsin’s inner circle who helped the president write his autobiography. He was replaced by career KGB official and former border guards chief Nikolai N. Bordyuzha.

The purge followed the enfeebled Yeltsin’s pattern of asserting power intermittently but dramatically and left him more isolated than at any other point in his presidency.

He called his top aides to the Kremlin for an 8 a.m. meeting and made his announcement in a booming voice.

“I have expressed gratitude to Yumashev and relieved him of his duties. He will be replaced by Nikolai Bordyuzha,” Yeltsin said--pointing for emphasis--in footage aired on national television. The change, he said, was intended to promote “strict discipline, order and reform.”

He also fired three of Yumashev’s deputies plus the head of a government communications agency and ordered that the Ministry of Justice and the tax police be directly subordinated to his control.

Yeltsin, 67, appeared to speak easily without the labored breathing evident in other recent appearances, although his hands trembled as he held a pencil. He wore a dark blue suit and a tie, a change from the sports shirts and cardigans he has worn in footage from the hospital.

Dmitri D. Yakushkin, the president’s spokesman, quoted Yeltsin as ending the meeting by saying: “You see how energetic I am.” By 11 a.m., he had left the Kremlin and was headed back to his quarters in the Central Clinical Hospital, where he has been convalescing from pneumonia since Nov. 22.

Although aides said Yeltsin’s goal was to increase stability, analysts predicted that the move will probably speed up the struggle to succeed the president.

“It’s desperate and pathetic,” respected political commentator Andrei A. Piontkovsky said. “It’s the only way he knows to demonstrate to himself that he’s still president and still in power.”

The purge consolidates Yeltsin’s formal authority over all aspects of the armed forces and law enforcement, while leaving members of Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov’s Cabinet untouched. It appears that while Yeltsin is insisting on direct control of the military and police, he will leave Primakov the thankless job of trying to rescue the sinking economy.

The shake-up comes during an already tense and unstable political season marked by accusations of corruption, a rise in anti-Semitism, open jockeying for position among potential successors, and the assassination of prominent liberal lawmaker Galina V. Starovoitova.

Russians are increasingly riled over the economic crisis, the government’s failure to pay wages and its lack of control over mobsters and their political allies.

In an interview on the NTV network, Bordyuzha, 49, presented the changes as an attempt by the president to intensify the fight against crime and corruption.

“You can see yourself what is happening,” Bordyuzha said. “People are being killed every day. Businessmen are killed; politicians are killed. We simply can’t go on like this. The most important thing is the fight against corruption, including corruption within the highest echelons.”

But analysts and politicians said it was yet another attempt by the weakened president to cling to power without taking day-to-day responsibility for the state of the nation.

“President Yeltsin has demonstrated to the whole world, and especially to his aides and political opponents, that he is not ready to settle down,” said Liliya F. Shevtsova, a political analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center. “He does not want to play the symbolic role of a token monarch.”

For months, aides have been urging Yeltsin to take a back seat, and such suggestions are reputed to have increased after the president was forced to cancel a trip to Austria in October. The Kremlin said he was suffering from “neuro-psychological asthenia,” an archaic medical term that could describe anything from nervous exhaustion to dementia.

Yumashev, who was brought onto Yeltsin’s staff in August 1996, had survived round after round of previous firings and was one of only two people believed to have the president’s ear. The other is Yeltsin’s younger daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko.

Other close aides, including former spokesman Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky and former security chief Andrei A. Kokoshin, were forced out in September, reputedly because they urged Yeltsin to cede or reduce his powers. Both have since begun working for one of the top candidates to succeed Yeltsin, Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov.

Kremlin watchers said Yumashev also may have earned Yeltsin’s ire by making similar suggestions.

“Yumashev was the only person left in the presidential administration who has always been close to the president, who has always been there to help and defend him,” Shevtsova said. “With Yumashev gone, Boris Yeltsin will be left surrounded by people who are preoccupied with one thing: escaping and finding other jobs. These people are ready to flee like rats from a sinking ship.”

Despite the tensions, a closely watched local election in the city of St. Petersburg, where Starovoitova was killed last month, appeared to go relatively smoothly. Although their foes were accused of conducting a campaign of “dirty tricks,” liberal parties appeared to make gains in voting for the city assembly.

Final results are expected later this week, and runoff elections are scheduled for Dec. 20.

*

Special correspondent Anna Badkhen in St. Petersburg contributed to this report.