Would-be president cultivates image as acceptable face of reform: Grigory Yavlinsky, the economist who yesterday announced he will run against Boris Yeltsin, sets out his views to Andrew Higgins in Moscow

IT WAS not a good day. Part of his think-tank got blown up; five of his staff were seized and threatened with execution; then, to avoid getting shot himself, he had to lie on his stomach for two hours in a dark alley off Pravda Street. All this to help Boris Yeltsin, whose politics he condemns as reckless, whose economics he attacks as back-to-front, whose advisers he dismisses as fools, and whose job as President of Russia Grigory Yavlinsky desperately wants for himself.

'It came very close, very close,' says the 41-year-old economist, presidential hopeful and, according to one opinion poll, Russia's most trusted political figure. He has no quarrel with calling in the army: 'There was no other choice. I begged him to be tougher, otherwise this country would be total chaos.' Otherwise, he quarrels endlessly.

Best known as co-author of 500- Day Plan and the Grand Bargain, the Soviet Union's flamboyant but ultimately untested stabs at radical economic surgery, Mr Yavlinsky still looks and sounds more a clever graduate student than a political heavyweight. He quit his last government job as deputy premier after only 95 days. He said he felt like a boxer in a ring without a referee. He took his skills to the provinces, advising Nizhny Novgorod, a pioneer in the privatisation of factories and, starting this month, farm land.

Cultivating his image as the reasoned face of reform, Mr Yavlinsky strongly opposed Decree No 1,400, Mr Yeltsin's 21 September diktat disbanding parliament and ordering new elections: 'Every country has Communists and fascists, in Germany, in Italy, in France. This is not the issue. Yeltsin gave them a chance to rally as guardians of the constitution, defenders of the White House. He made heroes of them.'

But then came Sunday, 3 October. Blackshirts, Communists and gun-freaks rampaged through the high-rise office block where Mr Yavlinsky works and, in the north of the city, a heavily armed rabble shot up the Ostankino Television Centre. Old feuds were forgotten. Mr Yavlinsky issued a statement backing Mr Yeltsin; he went on Ekho Moskvy radio station to rally support; and then, along with Yegor Gaidar, did the same on television from a reserve studio near the offices of Pravda newspaper.

Caught in a gun battle outside the studio, he took cover on the ground. He finally escaped through backlots and gardens to make the tail-end of an all-night, pro-Yeltsin street vigil in the centre of Moscow. 'People kept asking me: 'Where is the president, where is the army? If the fascists come now we will all die.'

Fear has gone - and with it solidarity. Russia has two elections ahead: for 450 seats in the State Duma, the lower house of a new parliament, in mid-December and, if Mr Yeltsin sticks to his word, for the presidency next June. Mr Yavlinsky, a declared candidate for both, is back on the campaign trail: 'This crisis shows Yeltsin is not up to it. He is not working seriously.' What seemed stark issues only a fortnight ago are blurred.

The dominant force in the new parliament is likely to be Russia's Choice, a pro-reform alliance launched last month ago under the slogan 'Freedom, property, law'. Mr Yavlinsky agrees with its goals but not its leaders, Mr Gaidar and his entourage. He decided to form his own group and field his own set of parliamentary candidates, as have two other prominent reformers, a Deputy Prime Minister, Sergei Shakhrai, and St Petersburg's mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. They all want to be president. And all are running for parliament too, hoping to use the contest as a springboard to the Kremlin.

An opinion poll published last month showed Mr Yavlinsky in with a good chance. Thirty three per cent of 1,024 people surveyed said they trusted him, compared with 24 per cent Mr Yeltsin, 21 per cent Alexander Rutskoi and 19 per cent Mr Gaidar and Mr Shakhrai. The same poll, though, also showed people did not see him as a president: he came behind both Mr Yeltsin and Mr Rutskoi.

(Photograph omitted)