Khasbulatov Woos Voters, Assails Yeltsin : Russia: With the big referendum a week away, Parliament chairman barnstorms the country.

TIKHVIN, Russia —  President Boris N. Yeltsin’s political archfoe barnstormed through this provincial town Saturday, leaving a slew of promises in his wake--assuming, of course, he will still be around to deliver after a national referendum one week from today.

Parliament Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov also took hard shots at Yeltsin, accusing the Russian president of being a lackey of the West, overstepping his powers, having ties to organized crime and wanting to raise taxes.

Seven days remain before Russian voters decide next Sunday whether they want new national elections for the president and Parliament and whether they support Yeltsin and his economic policies.

Khasbulatov has borrowed a page from the American textbook on whistle-stop campaigning, as has Yeltsin. The president is scheduled today to visit the old Russian city of Vladimir for Orthodox Easter festivities.

The Parliament chairman’s arrival in Tikhvin by helicopter from St. Petersburg, about 115 miles to the west, and his police-escorted bus tour brought young and old to muddy roadsides here.

Townspeople waved, rooted and craned their necks for a glimpse of the man in the long, black leather coat who has become a symbol of opposition to Yeltsin.

Khasbulatov whirled from photo op to photo op, chatting with patients at the local hospital and workers at the Transmash tractor parts factory, which, with its 18,000 employees, is the center of modern Tikhvin.

He promised lower taxes for all and squeezed in a stop to lay flowers on a monument to celebrated 19th-Century classical composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the town’s most famous son.

But like Yeltsin last week, Khasbulatov, an economist by profession, seemed afflicted with lockjaw when he came face to face with voters. Confronted by the people who gathered on the streets to meet him, Khasbulatov would politely field a question or two, then hurry to his next stop.

One-industry towns like Tikhvin, population 76,000, have perhaps suffered more than bigger and more diverse cities under Yeltsin’s economic policies.

Transmash built 70% of Tikhvin’s modern apartment buildings for its personnel. Now the plant is open only four days a week and even then is largely idle.

Not surprisingly, Tikhviners look sourly upon Yeltsin and his economic record, which may have been one of the things that lured Khasbulatov here. Vladimir Yelofimov, chairman of the town’s economic development committee, said that Tikhvin cast fewer votes for Yeltsin than any other municipality in the St. Petersburg region in the 1991 presidential election.

Khasbulatov was warmly applauded when he derided the renewed flood of Western aid to Russia as useless and humiliating and when he accused Yeltsin of being motivated by personal political interests in soliciting the aid.

“I would have lost my self-respect if I had asked those leaders of other countries to support me personally,” Khasbulatov said.

When asked about a speech Friday by Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi, in which Rutskoi alleged widespread corruption in the Yeltsin administration, Khasbulatov said he possessed much of the same information.

He asserted that as long as a year and a half ago, he gave Yeltsin facts about government corruption, including names, but that the president took no action.

In St. Petersburg, where Khasbulatov stayed for two days before taking a helicopter to Tikhvin’s drab, Soviet-built center and charming outskirts of wooden cottages, he accused Yeltsin of knowingly appointing corrupt people and cronies as ministers.

Khasbulatov said he does not expect anything to be settled by the referendum.

“We will see April 25 that there will be no victor,” he said. “There will be losers, and a further weakening of the state. Nothing else. No one will win.”

In Moscow on Saturday, about 2,000 anti-Yeltsin protesters, most of them elderly, huddled in the cold evening air under red flags and pro-Communist slogans by the statue of V.I. Lenin in October Square.

They repeatedly threatened to march on the Kremlin and hold what, for Communist atheists, was to be a singular sort of demonstration--an Easter service lit by 1,000 candles on Red Square.

Three hours later, in the presence of a huge force of police and security forces, Working Russia leader Viktor Anpilov asked the crowd to disperse quietly and not attempt to march on Red Square, since “Yeltsin needs this provocation to use it for his ends before the referendum.”

Sergei Loiko, a reporter in the Moscow bureau of The Times, contributed to this story.