Yeltsin Reshuffles Cabinet

In an apparent effort to tighten his grip on power, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin fired a pro-Communist Cabinet minister Tuesday and promoted a loyal police commander.

The dismissal of First Deputy Prime Minister Vadim A. Gustov and elevation of Interior Minister Sergei V. Stepashin is yet another curb on Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov, whose surge in popularity has appeared to irk the president.

“This is a clear signal to Primakov that his time may come too and he should be prepared for it,” said Kremlin watcher Andrei A. Piontkovsky, director of the Independent Institute for Strategic Studies.

Since Primakov became prime minister more than seven months ago, the former foreign minister has shed his image as a stolid, colorless official and is seen as a powerful politician who might have his own designs on the presidency.

In an effort to appease Yeltsin’s hard-line opposition, Primakov named a number of leftist or Communist-leaning ministers to his Cabinet last fall. One was Gustov, a former governor of the Leningrad region who was put in charge of relations between the Kremlin and the country’s 89 regions and provinces.

Yeltsin spokesman Dmitri D. Yakushkin said the president’s intention was to prevent disorder in advance of national elections in December, when Russia will elect a new parliament.

“He said his main purpose is to ensure the fairness and cleanliness of the elections,” Yakushkin said.

Gustov’s replacement, Stepashin, 47, is a former head of the Federal Security Service, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB. He is best known in Russia as one of the chief proponents of the unpopular war in Chechnya earlier this decade. The promotion of Stepashin, a Yeltsin loyalist, suggests that the president wants to ensure his control over the country’s armed forces. Stepashin is the first interior minister to achieve the rank of first deputy prime minister.

“Yeltsin is deploying at the top of the government his own loyal center almost equal in power to Primakov,” Piontkovsky said. “In case of an emergency, Stepashin can always be counted on to firmly take the president’s side.”

The move is the latest in an ongoing Kremlin power struggle in which allegations of corruption have been leveled at a number of leftist Cabinet ministers, including Gustov.