MOSCOW -- When President Boris N. Yeltsin starts firing his allies, it's a pretty good sign that his antagonists had better look for cover.

There's a storm brewing in Russian politics, but no one in Moscow yesterday could be quite sure which way it's going to break. Yeltsin -- capricious, sometimes shrewd, generally crafty -- was still in his hospital bed recovering from an ulcer.

The shadowy and manipulative tycoon, Boris A. Berezovsky, was in Azerbaijan pondering Yeltsin's announcement Thursday that he was to be removed from his government post.

Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov, the chief Berezovsky opponent, was on vacation on the Black Sea. Having prevailed for the moment in his monthlong campaign against Berezovsky, he must now consider what form the payback is going to take.

Firing people has long been Yeltsin's way of asserting control. He fired Berezovsky once before, when the businessman got into a feud with Anatoly Chubais, who was head of the privatization effort. Then Yeltsin fired Chubais.

"Berezovsky has lost, but it doesn't mean Primakov has strengthened his position," said Sergei Mitrokhin, a member of parliament. "Yeltsin always balances one against the other."

Berezovsky made a fortune selling cars, taking over newspapers, getting his hands (reportedly) on Aeroflot and on the ORT television network, befriending Yeltsin's daughter, moving in and out of governmentservice, and keeping in the forefront of public attention.

He has been serving most recently as secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a toothless association of 12 former Soviet republics.

Investigators, moving against him at Primakov's behest, have been dissecting his complicated relationship with Aeroflot and also leaked the accusation that he bugged the Kremlin for his own purposes.

Berezovsky has long been thought to have Yeltsin's ear. So now politicians and onlookers are trying to decide what Yeltsin was up to by firing him.

Technically, the Russian president doesn't have the authority to do that on his own -- but no one from the other member states is stopping him.

Berezovsky, in a meeting with Haydar Aliyev, president of Azerbaijan, said yesterday that the whole episode smacked of Russian imperialism. That's not an accusation Moscow is going to worry itself over.

"It was an ultimatum from the prime minister," was how Leonid Korotkov, a Communist member of parliament, saw it.

The newspaper Argumenti i Fakti reported this week that Yeltsin was about to insist on the firing of Yuri Maslyukov, first deputy prime minister and a Communist who has been leading talks about new loans from the International Monetary Fund.

The Kremlin denied the report, but if Maslyukov were to go it would leave Primakov less able to defend himself against attacks by the Communists. That would cut the prime minister down a peg or two, but it might be bad politics for Yeltsin.

"It's good for Yeltsin and his team that people like Maslyukov are in the government," said Korotkov. "They can be blamed for the economic failures. If there were no Maslyukov in the government, such a person would have to be invented."

But there seems to be so much jockeying for position right now -- with Primakov promoting a "truce" between the branches of government that would seem to benefit himself, mostly, while Yeltsin casts a cold eye on anyone who shows any signs of presidential ambitions -- that economic failure doesn't appear to be uppermost in politicians' minds.

"Nothing in fact is being done" about the economy, said Vyacheslav Kuznetsov, of the Our Home Is Russia faction in parliament. "A critical mass is being accumulated and at some point it will explode. Yet economic measures are being sacrificed to political intrigues. All these firings are the result of the impotence of power. The president is not in the control of the situation."

Public opinion hardly counts. In fact most of the public turned away from politics long ago. People keep going, despite economic collapse, rampant corruption, political intrigue and overall inaction by the government.

This frees the main players to focus on cutting one another's throats.

But there are real limits to the amount of time Russia can coast onward without decisive direction. The government's budget is predicated on receiving a loan of more than $4 billion from the IMF. If that money doesn't materialize by April, the budget becomes worthless and the ruble will shortly follow. The illusion of stability fostered by Primakov will vanish.

"If negotiations with the IMF fail, we will witness a complete default of Russia,'" said Alexander Vengerovsky, an independent member of parliament. "There will be no budget, and that will be the beginning of Russia's disintegration."

Primakov talked with Michel Camdessus, director of the IMF, by phone yesterday from his vacation home, and is planning a trip to IMF headquarters in Washington at the end of this month.

But a confrontation between Yeltsin's people and the parliamentary opposition could well take place before then, and that could complicate things for everyone in ways that are impossible to predict. The president may try to move quickly, before Primakov returns from the Black Sea.

"To my mind," said Mitrokhin, "there is no doubt that Primakov is in exile and by the end of his vacation some more changes will take place."

Pub Date: 3/06/99