Anti-West Mood Permeates Angry Russian Congress : Politics: As economy falls, resentment rises against foreign interference.

MOSCOW —  With Russia’s economy in tatters, Vice President Alexandr V. Rutskoi stood in the Great Kremlin Palace and spoke with controlled indignation on a matter of national pride.

“We must remember our history,” he said. “The way out of this crisis must be based on our own possibilities and not on a mystical hope that the West will help us. Nobody in the West is willing to create a competitor with his own hands.”

To applause from the Congress of People’s Deputies, the conservative critic of the reformist government railed on: “It is not the task of the International Monetary Fund to stabilize our financial system. We are able to stabilize it ourselves without moralizing and good wishes.”

Although President Boris N. Yeltsin is relying heavily on aid from the West to ease Russia’s transition from communism to capitalism, a current of resentment against American and other Western influence is rising here--even among Yeltsin’s ranks--as his 11-month free-market program falters.

Distrust of Western motives and “models” runs through debate in the 1,041-member Congress, which opened a biannual session this week contemplating the survival of the government led by reformist Yegor T. Gaidar, Yeltsin’s acting prime minister.

Blaming Gaidar for a near-collapse of the ruble, 25% monthly inflation and a 20% shrinkage of the Russian economy since the reforms began, the Congress gave preliminary approval Friday to a resolution censuring his performance and demanding policy changes.

The resolution, subject to further discussion and voting, weakened Gaidar’s position as the Congress neared secret balloting on constitutional amendments that would deprive Yeltsin of the final word on all ministerial appointments. Procedural motions Friday showed his foes just a few votes short of the two-thirds majority they need.

In the raucous Congress sessions, the issue of Gaidar’s stewardship holds much of the focus of broader debate over Russia’s place in the post-Soviet world. After 70 years of communism, lawmakers are asking themselves whether their president should rule with as much power as Charles de Gaulle wielded in France, whether their economy should imitate the United States’ or Sweden’s.

Gaidar, 36, who lobbied so effectively in Washington last spring to secure $24 billion in Western aid, is now, in Russia’s latest time of troubles, condemned by ultranationalists in the Congress for leading Russia into the IMF and letting it set conditions for aid.

“Gaidar is doing his best to destroy the economy and make Russia a source of raw materials for Western civilization, the task that the IMF has asked him to do,” said Mikhail G. Astafiev of the right-wing Russian Unity Bloc. “He has carried out his orders brilliantly.”

Gaidar, who even came under attack for his fluency in English, felt obliged at one point to declare, “This government is not an assembly of agents of international imperialism and foreign spies.”

Russians have never been sure whether to view themselves as a Western or Eastern society. Not far from the Kremlin’s onion domes, modern Moscow sports Barbie-doll billboards. Gaidar’s defenders in Congress speak admiringly of Dutch dairy farming, German machinery and American television. Slavophiles are quick to denounce such imitations as dangerous.

Surveys conducted over the past five months by the Moscow-based Mnenia Poll Service underscore Russians’ ambivalence. On the one hand, 60% of those polled consider the United States a friendly country and 70% believe Russia needs foreign aid to solve its problems. On the other hand, 57% said Russia, rather than play catch-up to the West, should “develop in its own way”.

“The common people like their Marlboros, Mars bars and Coca-Cola,” said Alexandr Lubimov, a Congress delegate from the centrist Civic Union. “But their leaders should take responsibility for finding a unique national identity.”

The Civic Union, speaking for managers of long-protected industries threatened by free-market reform, has moved away from Yeltsin toward the so-called “red-brown” opposition made up of ultranationalists and unrepentant Communists. Trying to woo them back, Yeltsin criticized the West this week for tying some of its aid to Russia’s purchase of Western goods. His aides have stressed a desire for strong ties with Asian countries and, in defiance of the West, a determination to continue exporting weapons to such countries as China and Iran.

Vladimir Lukin, Russia’s ambassador to the United States and a member of the Congress here, said Washington “should not react hysterically” to anti-Western rhetoric. “It represents many things,” he said in an interview, “from our ignorance of the West to the real Marxist-Leninist position of the IMF, which pretends to know the absolute truth for each country.”

Lukin is mentioned as a possible replacement for Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev, who is in trouble with nationalists bewildered by the loss of Russia’s superpower status. He stands accused of obediently adhering to U.S. policy designs.

One leading ultranationalist, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, gave an American reporter a taste of his frustration in the hall outside Congress’ chamber Friday.

“Kozyrev is a CIA agent,” he spouted, jabbing a forefinger at his interviewer. “We don’t need any Westerners here. Don’t poke your noses in Russia. Don’t awaken the beast in us. Otherwise, we’ll start supporting your blacks with guns and literature. Florida will become a black republic. Texas and California will secede and go to Mexico. And we’ll take back Alaska.”

More significant criticism of the new order comes from such onetime Yeltsin allies as Vice President Rutskoi, who now refers to Western aid as “fresh cheese in a mousetrap,” and Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, chairman of the Congress.

In a spirited exchange with Gaidar, Khasbulatov declared that the government should move away from its “American model” of free-market capitalism toward a “Scandinavian model,” with a strong state role in the economy. Rejecting a state bailout of failing industries, Gaidar shot back: “We are not in a big square where we can calmly discuss which road to take to get to a happy future. We stand on a very narrow path, and can get out of the crisis only if we go along that path very carefully.”

Otherwise, he warned, “we will develop not according to the American or Swedish pattern but according to African or Latin American patterns.”

Andrei Ostroukh of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.