RUSSIAN SHIFT ALTERS OUTLOOK : FIRINGS AT KREMLIN PUT REFORM ON TOP.

Byline: Inga Saffron Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

It was more than a cabinet reshuffle, less than a coup, and it left Russia's political landscape utterly transformed.

As a tumultuous week began, President Boris N. Yeltsin renewed his political stock with a first-place finish in the preliminary round of the Russian presidential election. By the time the dust settled, an upstart general with little governmental experience had become the second most powerful person in the Kremlin, a quartet of hard-liners had lost their sinecures, and Russia's oft-maligned reformers were back in ascendancy.

The Kremlin reformers were euphoric - finally rid of the cagey hard-liners who had dominated Yeltsin and tormented them for most of the last two years. But a victory for reformers does not necessarily translate into a victory for reforms.

For one thing, the July 3 runoff between Yeltsin and Communist Gennady A. Zyuganov remains a tight race. Yeltsin will have to work hard to get his constituents to the polls, especially the many who like to spend their free summer days at their country dachas.

Even if Yeltsin wins, it is not certain that he will go along with the reformers' radical program, which proposes selling everything from factories to universities to the private sector. But analyst Andrei Piontkowsky is among those who expect a major shift in tone inside the Kremlin now that the liberal wing is in charge.

``The chance of finding a peaceful solution to the war in Chechnya is much higher with the party of peace in power,'' said Piontkowsky, of the Moscow Center for Strategic Studies.

It also means Yeltsin is more likely to stick with his reformist prime minister, Viktor S. Chernomyrdin.

The pivotal figure in last week's Kremlin intrigue was the charismatic Gen. Alexander Lebed, a moderate nationalist with a strong war record and a free-market outlook who finished third in the voting. After Yeltsin secured Lebed's support by appointing him to the powerful post of national security chief, he became a kind of counterbalance to Kremlin hard-liners.

Working with Lebed, the liberal faction inside the Kremlin outmaneuvered its hard-line foes in the predawn hours of Thursday morning. By the end of the week, four top Kremlin insiders were out of a job. All four are members of the ``party of war,'' the name commonly given to the group that instigated the Chechen conflict.

Yeltsin sacked his defense minister, secret service chief, a deputy prime minister and - most surprising of all - his longtime drinking buddy and bodyguard, Alexander Korzhakov, who headed the 20,000-man presidential guard service.

``It's an almost unbelievable success for the reformers,'' Piontkowsky said.

``Instead of three dumb generals, Yeltsin got one normal one,'' wrote the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets in a front-page commentary, and the compliment was aimed at Lebed. ``And we'd like to believe (he also got the votes of) several million people.''

But the week of confusing upheavals may only add to voters' misgivings about Yeltsin, as Zyuganov emphasized in his statements last week.

``Feeling they have no chances left to win the elections, Mr. Yeltsin and his team, under the guise of this talk about a coup d'etat, are engaged in carrying out their own creeping coups at the top,'' Zyuganov said. ``They are turning life into a comedy, trying to block the second round.''

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PHOTO Boris N. Yeltsin

Listening to liberals