The government survived a vote of no-confidence in a showdown with opponents in the State Duma on Thursday, moments after Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin outlined a budget for 1995 that called for tougher and faster economic reform.


"We cannot stall reform. Today we need radical advance," Chernomyrdin told reporters after the vote. "We plan strict economic policies."


Opposition factions, which had long been preparing for Thursday's no-confidence motion, fell 32 votes short of the required absolute majority of 226 votes. 194 deputies voted for the no-confidence motion, 54 against and 55 abstained.


President Boris Yeltsin had intervened just hours before the ballot to lessen the attack on the government by firing Agriculture Minister Viktor Khlystun and replacing him with Alexander Nazarchuk of the anti-government Agrarian Party faction.


Khlystun had a low-profile job compared to deputy prime minister Alexander Zaveryukha, who also has an agriculture portfolio. He therefore appeared to be a figure whom Yeltsin could dispense with cheaply to neutralize the opposition.


But when the vote was announced, the arithmetic suggested that many of the 55 Agrarian deputies, whose votes Yeltsin had evidently been trying to buy, had voted against the government all the same.


Opposition leaders, who had doubtless done their own calculations before the session, made no secret of their knowledge that the vote could fail. "We are not ready for it yet," Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov. "Too many people in this parliament are tarred by participation in this government's criminal policy."


Ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky turned toward the section where government ministers sat in the Duma's hall in what looked like helpless rage.


"Gentlemen ministers, give up your posts now, because next year you will be arrested," he added.


Chernomyrdin, looking confident in the face of heckling from the hardline opposition, outlined his tough draft budget for 1995 to the chamber shortly before the vote, saying that it was the only hope to strengthen economic stabilization in the country.


The budget envisages a deficit of 72 trillion rubles, or less than eight percent GDP and forecasts a drop in the monthly inflation level to one percent by the end of next year.


"On the one hand this is a reflection of the crisis the Russian economy is going through," Chernomyrdin said of the vote. "On the other hand it is evidence that we have crossed a crucial frontier in our reforms."


"There's no avoiding the truth: people's life is such as inflation allows and inflation is such as our policy allows," he said, adding that despite the proposed anti-inflationary measures he could not "promise a good living" to all Russians.


But Chernomyrdin looked browbeaten and somewhat puzzled after speeches by Duma leaders, not one of whom found anything good to say about the government's performance.


"I've got some food for thought now," the prime minister told reporters after the session.


He also said there would be more changes in the government, though he declined to say who would leave or join it.


Privatization minister Anatoly Chubais, who is one of the few radical reformers remaining in the government and a favorite bugbear of the opposition, interpreted the vote as a moral victory for market reform.


"The Duma did not vote no-confidence in the government," he said. "That gives us all the more reason to plow ahead without paying attention to the whining of the weak opposition."


Sergei Glazyev, who had proposed the motion, tried to hide his disappointment at the outcome.


"This is no victory for the government," he said. "Forty percent of the deputies voted against it and only 20 percent backed it.


The opposition appeared to draw fresh strength for a push to bring down the government after the ruble fiasco two weeks ago, when the currency had lost nearly 30 percent of its value in a day.


But the momentum appeared to slip away as the vote was delayed, and even if the motion had passed, Yeltsin would have had the option of ignoring it and, faced with a second vote, of dissolving parliament and calling new elections.


The strongest note struck in the debate was one of disillusionment. More than 100 deputies either abstained or did not vote at all.


"At the moment we cannot express our confidence because we have to call the work of the government unsatisfactory," said Yekaterina Lakhova, leader of the Women of Russia faction, which abstained. "But to express no-confidence will only make the situation worse."


Presidential hopeful Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of an anti-Yeltsin liberal faction, said the whole vote was a charade which would not affect the real ruler of the country, President Yeltsin. He released a statement in which for the first time he called for early presidential elections.