Chubais

MOSCOW -- A nasty new round of political infighting has engulfed the Kremlin, with President Boris N. Yeltsin now confined to his bed in preparation for heart surgery that may occur in less than a week.Even though Yeltsin canceled all of his meetings this week, he managed to provoke his opponents by endorsing the appointment of a wealthy entrepreneur to the National Security Council.The president's chief of staff, Anatoly B. Chubais, an aggressive advocate of market reforms, became the lightning rod for the criticism.

MOSCOW -- He stays under a shadow's edge, as befits a Kremlin strategist, but presidential aide Anatoly Chubais has become Russia's leading power broker while President Boris N. Yeltsin is sick on the sidelines.With Yeltsin scheduled for heart surgery after two months of being mostly off the job, and with the Kremlin roiled by internal conflict, Chubais, the Kremlin chief of staff, increasingly is calling the shots in Russia."The fact is that Yeltsin is not in charge," said Sergei Baburin, deputy speaker of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament.

MOSCOW -- Asked about the health of President Boris N. Yeltsin, his chief of staff, Anatoly Chubais, admitted yesterday that there was a problem.Yeltsin, he said, was fine. But Chubais conceded that the Kremlin had mishandled growing skepticism about the 65-year-old president's condition. He refused to describe Yeltsin's symptoms, but promised that a "new information policy" would be unveiled in the next few days. "The less official information there is," he said, "the more rumors, conjectures and speculations there are."

MOSCOW -- President Boris N. Yeltsin yesterday heightened alarm about his health and gave new impetus to a power struggle in the Kremlin when he abruptly left Moscow for a sanitarium.His sudden departure for what an aide described as a two-week vacation stunned an American delegation headed by Vice President Al Gore, whose meeting with Yeltsin was canceled at the last minute. The Americans had hoped to use the meeting to underscore support for the Russian president and assess his physical stamina following a grueling re-election campaign.

MOSCOW -- Two days after President Boris N. Yeltsin scored a resounding re-election victory, his top aides are involved in a bruising and very public struggle for power.Tension between the new security chief, Alexander Lebed, and the reappointed prime minister, Victor Chernomyrdin, has simmered for weeks as Lebed boldly outlined his outsized ambitions, including shaping economic policy and positioning himself as Yeltsin's successor.Lebed, a former general who was brought into the Yeltsin camp only after he took third place in the first round of presidential voting on June 16, seemed at first to have bullied his way to the top.But Chernomyrdin has regained the upper hand, and his allies are sternly lecturing Lebed to restrain his push for power and curb his tongue.

MOSCOW -- President Boris N. Yeltsin fired three hard-line members of his administration yesterday after a power struggle in which Kremlin liberals accused the hard-liners of preparing a coup to stop a runoff presidential election.The Kremlin intrigue left Gen. Alexander I. Lebed, the newly appointed national security chief, as possibly the second most powerful person in Russia.Yeltsin dismissed Alexander Korzhakov, his secretive personal security chief and longtime confidant; Mikhail Barsukov, head of the Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB; and Oleg Soskovets, a first deputy prime minister tied to the old military-industrial complex who has tried to slow economic reforms.

MOSCOW -- Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov just keeps getting stronger and stronger.Yesterday, President Boris N. Yeltsin himself declared that Mr. Luzhkov was free to ignore the national government's policies on privatization. All of Russia might be going in one direction in the great post-Soviet sell-off -- but not Moscow.And privatization is only his most recent success. For six months Mr. Luzhkov has been asserting and extending his control over the city in different ways.In October he had the police drive away itinerant traders from the non-Russian fringes of the former Soviet Union.

MOSCOW -- At the first signs of reformist weakness, economists of another era have begun to materialize here, urgently calling for more price controls and regulation of production.President Boris N. Yeltsin quickly swatted them away, a high government official said yesterday, but their emergence serves as a reminder not only of how far Russia has developed its reformist thinking but of how patiently and tenaciously the opposition has awaited this moment.The economists who resurfaced this week, sounding as if they were from the long distant past, actually were from the era of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the former Soviet president who left office in December 1991.