Yeltsin Scraps Schedule, Extends Hospital Stay : Russia: Aides insist that the president’s condition has not worsened. But the abrupt change in plans surprises diplomats.

MOSCOW — Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin has canceled a state visit to Norway and all other activities on his schedule next week to stay in the hospital and continue recovering from heart trouble, aides announced Friday.

Repeated earlier reports from the Kremlin had said that the 64-year-old Russian leader, who was rushed to the hospital Tuesday, was quickly improving and would check out Monday.

In disclosing the abrupt change of plans, Yeltsin aide Viktor V. Ilyushin insisted that his boss’s condition had not worsened. But independent heart specialists said the longer hospital stay could mean that Yeltsin’s illness had been worse to begin with than the Kremlin had let on.

Officially, Yeltsin suffered “acute” chest pains caused by cardiac ischemia, a constriction of the blood supply to the heart.

That broad diagnosis covers a range of conditions from a mild, one-time spasm to unstable angina, in which the spasms recur, to a heart attack.

Dr. Manuel Cerqueira, associate chief of cardiology at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, said a patient with a mild spasm can usually go home from the hospital after five or six days. “Unless there’s some political reason for Yeltsin to stay a week longer, I would worry that he has unstable angina or may have suffered a heart attack,” he said in a telephone interview.

Yeltsin’s doctors have released no data on his illness. Their reports have been filtered through Kremlin spokesmen, whose unusually frequent but vague medical updates have portrayed the president as an attentive statesman still at work under medical supervision--walking about, making phone calls and signing papers. His blood pressure is reportedly stable and his electrocardiogram normal.

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Responding to complaints by incredulous Russian commentators, Yeltsin allowed himself to be photographed in his room at Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital, seated at a desk in a green-and-white tennis shirt, with papers in front of him and four telephones to the side. A photo was released Friday by Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency.

Cerqueira said such activity and test results are not impossible for the recent victim of a mild heart attack, “although I wouldn’t advise getting up and walking around.”

Despite their efforts to be more open about the president’s illness than was the case with regard to his Communist predecessors, Yeltsin’s aides and especially his wife have bristled at attempts by Russian media to fill in holes in the official story.

Naina I. Yeltsin met reporters Friday and said a skeptical article in the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets on her husband’s condition was “verbal sadism.” The well-reasoned article, by Natalia Timakova, suggested that Yeltsin fell ill after toasting his chief of staff at a birthday party Monday night. “A woman should not write like that,” Mrs. Yeltsin scolded. “The journalist was not thinking about the country, about its people who worry about the president’s health or about his family.

“I can put Russians at ease,” she added, reporting on her daily visit to her husband and not looking at all worried. “Boris Yeltsin’s health is fine. . . . But this treatment should not be hurried.”

Mrs. Yeltsin came forward once before, in March, 1994, to defend her husband against reports of drunkenness and declining health that increasingly shadow his presidency. “There isn’t a single country in the world where they speculate about the president’s health as they do here,” she said then.

The delay of Yeltsin’s hospital checkout took foreign officials by surprise. “We had been reassured, as everyone else had, that the visit [to Norway] was on and that he was doing reasonably well,” a senior Western diplomat in Moscow said.

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Yeltsin spokesman Sergei K. Medvedev said the three-day Norway trip, which was to have started Wednesday, will probably take place in late August or early September. Yeltsin also canceled a meeting with Parliament leaders and a trip to the northern Russian port of Murmansk. Medvedev said Yeltsin had wanted to leave the hospital but was dissuaded from doing so by his doctors, who were worried about the stress of air travel.

Ilyushin, who is close to Yeltsin, had a different explanation. It sounded as obscure as anything that issued from the Kremlin on behalf of a string of dying Soviet leaders in the 1980s.

“The current situation in Russia urgently requires more time for the president to recover after such an, I would say, unexpected hospitalization,” Ilyushin said in a televised interview. “Now he will have an opportunity to recover better, because at the end of the year and later there will be so many different events that will require serious psychological and nervous strain. . . . A man who has had to perform such a serious job, . . . I think that is quite a strain on one man’s system.”

Russia faces parliamentary elections in December and presidential elections six months later. To quiet speculation that his hospitalization might alter the election schedule, Yeltsin issued a decree Friday setting Dec. 17 as the date of the parliamentary vote.

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“Passions will now subside about whether the elections are to be held or not,” said Ivan P. Rybkin, chairman of the Duma, the lower house of Parliament.

Russians continued to speculate that Yeltsin’s prolonged hospital stay is politically motivated. The Rev. Gleb P. Yakunin, a member of the Duma, said that Yeltsin, whose approval rating is at an all-time low, may be looking for a face-saving medical pretext to avoid seeking another five-year term. Or perhaps, he speculated, Yeltsin may be ducking responsibility for a controversial peace accord still being negotiated between his government and separatist rebels in the republic of Chechnya.