Defense Minister Pavel Grachev faces some of the most challenging days of his career Thursday and Friday, when parliament calls him to account over allegations of widespread corruption in the armed forces.


On Thursday the Duma's defense committee is to debate a motion of no confidence in Grachev, and Friday the minister has been called to address a full session of the Duma on morale in the army.


This will be the first time Grachev has had to give account of himself to parliament since the murder of Dmitry Kholodov, the reporter killed while investigating corruption in the Western Group of Forces. The defense minister is certain to face a barrage of attacks from a legislature in which he has virtually no supporters.


But deputies and analysts said Wednesday that Grachev is likely to end up bruised but not beaten from his rough ride at the Duma, since only President Boris Yeltsin has any real power to decide Grachev's fate.


Sergei Yushenkov, the liberal chairman of the Duma's defense committee, said he thought Yeltsin would most likely ignore parliament's onslaught, and Grachev would stay on. "It doesn't depend on us," he said.


Yushenkov, an influential deputy in the pro-Yeltsin Russia's Choice faction, recently for the first time called for Grachev to step down. "He will stay on as minister of defense whatever the Duma decides," commented Alexander Piskunov, the defense committee's deputy chairman. "But his fate also depends on what kind of budget we adopt."


Piskunov was barred from a meeting between Yeltsin and Russia's top military officers Monday, further souring relations between the parliament and the Defense Ministry.


The defense committee says the ministry has not kept to the law on the 1994 budget and has failed to provide a breakdown on how it has spent its budget allocations. Piskunov said two weeks ago that "the Defense Ministry has practically completely left the control of the government."


In the last two months Grachev's enemies have multiplied. The liberal press has been calling for his head since Kholodov was assassinated by a booby-trapped bomb Oct. 17. Moskovsky Komsomolets dubbed Grachev "Pasha Mercedes" after alleging he acquired an illicit Mercedes from Germany.


The defense minister, always a hate figure for the opposition, has now also lost the support of the reformist political camp.


"He is an odious figure," said Arkady Murashyov, another deputy in Russia's Choice, on Wednesday. "He has no support in the army or anywhere. No one supports him anymore."


Murashyov repeated the charges, made with increasing frequency in recent weeks, that Grachev was personally responsible for the alleged mass corruption in the Russian army's Western Group of Forces.


But analysts said Yeltsin would be reluctant to part company with one of his most loyal ministers, who played a key role in rescuing him during the attempted putsch in August 1991 and the White House revolt of October 1993.


Sacking Grachev would solve none of Yeltsin's problems, said Alexander Golz, a commentator with the military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. The president is faced with a choice between a less trusted and more independent figure or the unswervingly loyal Grachev.


"A new minister will encounter exactly the same problems," Golz said. "It's better for him to have a person who has displayed his reliability."


If and when Grachev does go, he there appear to be three main contender for his replacement: Andrei Kokoshin, the civilian first deputy minister, who is the liberals' candidate to reform the military; the well respected chief of Russia's border guard troops, Andrei Nikolayev; and the opposition's main hope, the maverick head of the 14th Army, Alexander Lebed.


Polls suggest Lebed is much more popular in the army than Grachev. He made his bid for the role of new broom in the army in an article in Wednesday's Nezavisimaya Gazeta and came down on the side of the legislature in the tug-of-war over the ministry between parliament and president.


Lebed, who has made no secret of wanting to become defense minister and who has publicly criticized Yeltsin, said the army was too much under the president's thumb and needed more civilian control. But he also said it would be risky for Russia to have a civilian defense minister in the near future, since "a civilian defense minister costs a lot" for the army.