Yeltsin Adds Some Traditional Touches to Administration

President Boris N. Yeltsin tied up some loose ends Saturday in his long-drawn-out battle to change prime ministers as he fired his glib, sophisticated spokesman, who according to Russian media had thrown in his lot with the wrong candidate for premier.

Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky, 44, a career diplomat, worked as Yeltsin’s spokesman for two years. He was abruptly dismissed less than 24 hours after new Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov was approved by parliament.

The presidential press service said that Yastrzhembsky, whose nerve-racking task since 1996 has been to interpret Yeltsin’s often contradictory utterances to an increasingly skeptical world and give them an air of logic, was being released from his duties “because of his transfer to another job.”

Sources in the Foreign Ministry told the Itar-Tass news agency that they did not know of any plans to take Yastrzhembsky, a former ambassador and Foreign Ministry spokesman, back onto their staff.

Yastrzhembsky himself, in a characteristically diplomatic farewell statement, said he needed time to sort things out but doubted he would continue state service. He thanked Yeltsin for “the unique opportunity of working with him in the interests of Russia over the past two years.”

Reshuffles inside the Yeltsin administration are running parallel to new government appointments taking place now that the stalemate over prime minister has been resolved--broadly speaking, in a shift of power away from capitalist-minded individuals to more conservative officials who favor a Soviet-style emphasis on state control.

As well as confirming Primakov, a former member of the Soviet Politburo, as prime minister, the Communist-dominated parliament approved as Primakov’s right-hand man in government Yuri D. Maslyukov, the last head of the Soviet state economic planning department, Gosplan, and as new Central Bank chairman Viktor V. Gerashchenko, who first held the job in Soviet days.

Supporters of these more conservative leaders are now likely to move into high-profile jobs across the administration.

According to NTV commercial television, Yastrzhembsky’s fatal error may have been to enrage the president by pleading the cause of the wrong prime ministerial candidate.

Yeltsin had tried for weeks to pressure the reluctant lawmakers into taking back his former premier, Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, for a second attempt at leading Russia out of its economic abyss. But lawmakers refused to accept Chernomyrdin. By the middle of last week, Yeltsin finally relented and proposed Primakov from an array of possible compromise figures.

The row prompted splits inside the presidential administration, with different Yeltsin aides proposing different compromise candidates.

NTV said Saturday that Yastrzhembsky and Andrei A. Kokoshin, then head of the nonelected Russian Security Council, a Kremlin advisory body, had petitioned Yeltsin to switch his allegiance from Chernomyrdin--but to the powerful mayor of Moscow, Yuri M. Luzhkov, rather than to Primakov.

Kokoshin was fired from the Security Council on Friday.

The Kommersant Daily newspaper said Saturday that the presidential administration had been divided into two camps for several days. The anti-Chernomyrdin camp was led by Kokoshin and Yastrzhembsky.

The pro-Chernomyrdin camp was led by Yeltsin’s daughter and advisor, Tatyana Dyachenko, and by Valentin Yumashev, the low-profile head of the presidential administration who is nicknamed the Kremlin’s “Gray Cardinal.”

When they realized that parliament would not accept Chernomyrdin, this powerful group reportedly changed its allegiance to Primakov, leaving Kokoshin and Yastrzhembsky out in the cold.

Itar-Tass said Yastrzhembsky will be replaced as Yeltsin’s press spokesman and No. 2 in the presidential administration by Alexander Voloshin. Voloshin has until now been an aide to Yumashev.