Russia’s No. 2 Has His Eye on Top Spot

MOSCOW —  Last year, when he began to speak his own conservative mind, Russian Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi made one thing clear: his loyalty to his reformist boss, Boris N. Yeltsin.

“God forbid anything should ever happen to the president,” he told an interviewer. “I fear that more than anything. . . . When we were elected together, I gave him my word as an officer that I would stay with him till the end.”

The air force general has kept his promise--to the dismay of Yeltsin’s supporters. For while remaining vice president, he has also kept up a drumbeat of criticism about his boss’s policies. And so the two men have been condemned to a tense cohabitation in the Kremlin, espousing divergent visions of how Russia should remake itself and deal with the outside world.

Rutskoi has made no secret of his presidential ambitions. Not only would he assume the office if Yeltsin were removed by a vote of Congress; he is also the favorite of the industrialists, Communists and neo-fascists who form the opposition. Under a proposal now being studied by Russian parliamentarians, he might get his chance to run for president as early as this autumn.

The strain between these two strong wills, which reflects the power struggle paralyzing Russia’s government, neared the breaking point after Yeltsin announced a week ago that he was assuming “special powers” to rule by decree.

Denouncing the move as unconstitutional, Rutskoi helped set in motion the most serious impeachment drive of Yeltsin’s 2-year-old presidency. Yeltsin backed down and the effort unraveled Friday in the Congress of People’s Deputies. When the dust settled, both men were still standing.

Stepping to the microphone, Rutskoi rejected demands by Yeltsin supporters that he resign, “unless the people who elected me express their no-confidence.” His voice thundered through the Grand Kremlin Palace: “It is not my habit to retreat!”

Then, offering a way out of the crisis and his own awkward position, he called for early elections, a proposal that is gaining support in the Congress.

Rutskoi, 45, a stocky man with silver hair and a brown mustache the size of a shoe brush, is a decorated war hero with a wounded sense of national pride. He calls himself a democrat and a reformer but also a “chauvinist” in the cause of “restoring Great Russia.” For more than a year, he has been criticizing what he calls Yeltsin’s “blind rush” toward a Western-aided free-market economy and voicing the dismay of those who find the process too painful, confusing and humiliating.

Rutskoi has called for slowing the pace of privatization of land and factories, reimposing some state control over prices and cracking down on corruption. He is suspicious of Western aid and advice, against Russia’s anti-Serbian tilt in the Balkans and in favor of a more vigorous defense of Russian interests in the now independent former Soviet republics.

“People are tired of what is happening,” he said in a speech earlier this week. “We call these reforms, expecting that they should open up a path to a better life. But the results of these reforms are all minus. There is not a single economic indicator that shows an improvement in people’s living conditions or successes in (economic) transformations.”

Critics call Rutskoi an opportunist who spoke out against the reforms only after being shut out of Yeltsin’s inner circle in 1991, a few months after they took office as Russia’s first democratically elected leaders. They call him an emotional man with the populist instinct for saying what an audience wants to hear.

In any case, Rutskoi’s distaste for the messiness of the market sounds like a genuine product of his 25 years in military uniform. He told a Russian interviewer last year that the government should behave more like the armed forces in its approach to reform.

“Military people have an excellent formula, which civilians dislike for some reason,” he said. “There are five conditions which must be met to secure progress in tackling any job. The first is sizing up the mission. The second is that you must estimate your capabilities. Then comes taking a decision. And, lastly, the system of execution and control over execution.

“If our ministries learned how to follow these conditions, the reform would proceed with clockwork precision. But whenever I say this I am immediately branded an anti-marketeer and anti-democratic. I am a marketeer and a democrat. Only I believe there is a need to think first, then act. If a pilot does otherwise he will simply crash.”

Rutskoi should know. The son and grandson of army officers, he flew combat missions in Afghanistan, where he was shot down twice and captured by U.S.-backed Muslim rebels. Rejecting an offer to emigrate to Canada, he was swapped for a Pakistani spy and came home one of the few Soviet heroes of an unpopular lost cause.

He ran for Parliament as an orthodox Communist and lost, then as a reformer and won. He was expelled by the Communist Party in 1991 for starting a reform group called Free Russia.

Because he was popular in the military and among Communist reformers, Rutskoi was chosen as Yeltsin’s running mate in June, 1991. Two months later he led the defense of Yeltsin’s White House against the hard-line Communist coup. Yeltsin rewarded him with a promotion from colonel to general.

Eyed with suspicion by earlier Communist dropouts in Yeltsin’s inner circle, Rutskoi was relieved of a role coordinating the reforms. He quickly branded the young economist advisers “boys in pink panties,” saying they were wrecking the country through “thoughtless experimentation.”

Yeltsin retaliated by assigning him to reform Russian agriculture, a task that has proved fatal to many a Kremlin career. He accepted without hesitation.

“What could a military man answer? ‘Yes, sir,’ and forward march! That’s the way we were taught,” he explained.

“He’s not a philosopher or a scholar or an economist, but what our country needs now first of all is law and order, and Rutskoi is a brilliant choice for that kind of mission,” said Iona I. Andronov, an independent in Congress.

Rutskoi, who is married with two grown sons, says he works 18-hour days, plays tennis four nights a week after 10 p.m. and likes to sip vodka after a hot bath. An Orthodox Christian, he says he visits the Zagorsk monastery outside Moscow every few months to rest his “heart and soul.”

Acquaintances say Rutskoi can be just as impulsive and inflexible as Yeltsin and lacks the 62-year-old president’s political intelligence and experience.

“Rutskoi acts like a commander in chief,” said Viktor I. Borisyuk, a former adviser. “He likes clear and simple decisions. I’m not sure that’s what Russia needs in a president today.”

Rutskoi has hitched his social democratic party to the Civic Union, a centrist alliance led by industrialists who managed the Soviet economy and are busy organizing a shadow Cabinet for him. He has also lobbied for support among neo-fascist groups and the moderate wing of the revived Russian Communist Party. Its leader, Gennady A. Zyuganov, calls Rutskoi’s positions “balanced and moderate.”

The vice president’s approval rating had been close to Yeltsin’s in recent months; about one-third of those surveyed in most opinion polls backed him. But it dropped after his attacks on Yeltsin this week, as many suspected him of maneuvering actively to unseat Yeltsin. His popularity among military officers is said to be limited outside the air force.

On the eve of Friday’s session of the Congress, Rutskoi was seen nervously pacing the gilt halls outside his Kremlin office at 3 a.m. In his speech to the deputies, Rutskoi attacked the president’s advisers rather than Yeltsin himself. His spin controllers argued that he had “rescued the president from impeachment” by persuading Yeltsin to withdraw his rule-by-decree decision.

Even now, Yeltsin is ready to welcome his running mate back into the governmental fold, presidential spokesman Vyacheslav V. Kostikov said. But “if he continues his dual game--meeting the president one day, holding negotiations with the opposition the next--I hope his conscience, as an officer and a citizen, will awaken,” said Kostikov.

A man who occasionally advises Rutskoi says he often wonders what’s on the vice president’s mind. He has watched Rutskoi evolve from orthodox Communist to reformer to champion of law and order, from loyalty to betrayal of Yeltsin.

“I like what he’s saying today, but how much of this is opportunism and how much of it is real commitment?” he asked. “I also remember Yeltsin as an orthodox Communist. We’ve all changed so much these last few years.”