Yeltsin

RUSSIAN President Boris N. Yeltsin has again tossed a political hand grenade before darting back behind the Kremlin's walls, leaving observers to wonder at his increasingly inexplicable behavior. With Mr. Yeltsin's firing of Prime Minister Sergei V. Stepashin last week, and his appointment of the virtually unknown Vladimir V. Putin as his successor, a total of four people have served in that position during the past 18 months. In the Western media, commentators struggling to explain the string of firings have concentrated on Mr. Yeltsin's poor health, in many cases linking his frailty to his concern to secure his legacy: a more democratic Russia, set on the path of market reforms, increasingly linked with the West and free from the menace of a Communist resurgence.

MOSCOW -- The news that Russia had a new prime minister was buried a full seven minutes into yesterday's evening newscast. Vladimir V. Putin's confirmation by the lower house of parliament was so thoroughly expected, and so widely believed to herald little in the way of real change, that it couldn't begin to compete with fresh reports from the fighting in southern Dagestan between Russian troops and Islamic rebels. Putin looks sterner and speaks more sharply than his predecessor, Sergei V. Stepashin, but members of the decisive lower house of parliament have refused to be drawn into a fight over his nomination.

MOSCOW -- The end of the world is near, warned some superstitious Russians, who, trusting in the country's mystical folklore, saw a bad omen in the final solar eclipse of this millennium.Russia survived the cosmic phenomenon; it is coping, too, with last week's Kremlin phenomenon.President Boris N. Yeltsin and his inner circle of political operatives and business tycoons produced yet another shock by naming former spy Vladimir Putin as Russia's fifth prime minister in 18 months.Putin, a former domestic security chief, also was hand-picked as the 68-year-old Yeltsin's successor in next year's presidential elections, signaling a new phase in Russia's post-Soviet evolution -- the open fight to succeed its only democratically elected president.

MOSCOW -- Reaching into the political shadows yesterday, President Boris N. Yeltsin plucked out a loyal retainer and produced him as heir to the presidency of Russia, a magisterial maneuver that required the dismissal of yet another faithful prime minister.In a brief televised address, Yeltsin informed the nation that he was nominating Vladimir V. Putin, a little-known former KGB agent as his new prime minister and chosen successor as president.After a short three months in office, Sergei V. Stepashin was out, the fourth prime minister in a year and a half to fall victim to a capricious president.

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration put the best face possible yesterday on Russia's latest political crisis, saying that President Boris N. Yeltsin's firing of Sergei V. Stepashin as prime minister was constitutionally legal and that it would likely have no immediate effect on U.S. relations with Moscow.U.S. officials also stressed that the administration already has a relationship with Vladimir V. Putin, whom Yeltsin chose as both the new prime minister and as his designated successor as president.

RUSSIAN President Boris N. Yeltsin is so erratic in his behavior that questions may be raised whether Vladimir Putin is truly his final choice for the next Kremlin leader. Even so, Mr. Putin, 47, has outstanding qualifications to rule unruly, corrupt and disorganized Russia, if it comes to that.His espionage activities in Germany and leadership of the Federal Security Service -- the main successor of the KGB -- have given Mr. Putin a good understanding of the modern world outside Russia.His work as the first deputy to St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak put him in close contact with all of Russia's reformist politicians.

MOSCOW -- Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin described Moscow's relationship with the United States and NATO as "difficult" yesterday and pointedly endorsed recent Russian military moves in Kosovo and over the Atlantic that alarmed the West.Before an assembled group of top military brass at the Kremlin, Yeltsin praised a vast Russian military exercise two weeks ago that saw two TU-95 Bear bombers heading close to NATO airspace, flying within 60 miles of Iceland.Yeltsin also singled out Col. Gen. Viktor Zavarzin, who led Russian troops that seized the airport at Pristina hours before NATO-led peacekeepers arrived in the Serbian province June 12, telling him: "Thank you for Kosovo."

MOSCOW -- On a sweltering afternoon in the first heat wave of Russia's summer, the room at 49 Leningradsky Prospekt is an oven.The lights are off and, as the shadows of late afternoon engulf the building, the room and its occupants bake in the dark.This is, as Russians might say, "normal."Electricity and air conditioning, like government and the economy, are things you can't take for granted in post-Soviet Russia.These days, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, winner of the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize and loser of the Cold War, works out of an office here, in a hulking, gray building with a discreet hammer-and-sickle emblem over the door, halfway between the Kremlin and the international airport.

MOSCOW -- Loyalty to Boris N. Yeltsin exacts its toll, as Russia's new prime minster, Sergei Stepashin, has been finding out. Stepashin may be in charge of the Cabinet, as he felt it necessary to point out earlier this week, but that doesn't mean he has much of a say in how it's put together.Stepashin has been burdened by Yeltsin with a deputy premier, Nikolai Aksyonenko, who acts as though he didn't hear the "deputy" part when he was offered the job. The other deputy premier, Mikhail Zadornov, was Stepashin's man, and the thinking was he might balance Aksyonenko.

MOSCOW -- Afraid of the public, afraid of the president, afraid of chaos and afraid of losing their jobs, the members of Russia's lower house of parliament meekly confirmed Sergei V. Stepashin as Russia's new prime minister yesterday."