Two days before the government was due to face a vote of no-confidence in the State Duma, Economics Minister Alexander Shokhin said Tuesday that the opposition was so divided it might abandon the motion altogether.


"It looks to me as though there won't be a vote of no-confidence," Shokhin told reporters. "That's my personal opinion. My experience of the political arithmetic shows that a vote of no-confidence won't pass."


The parliamentary opposition is in a quandary over the vote. Only two or three hardline factions can be relied on to condemn a group of ministers that includes conservatives such as agricultural lobbyist Aleksandr Zaveryukha, as well as reformers like Shokhin -- a group that could theoretically be replaced by something they like even less.


Shokhin played on this by holding out the promise of talks with the opposition Thursday.


"If opposition leaders -- not all of them of course; some of them are not interested in this -- want to do something to round off our program, make it more concrete, we are ready to work with them," he said.


However, the outline budget for 1995, which Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin is due to present to the Duma on Thursday, is not likely to go down well. It is very stingy on credits and will keep the deficit to around 8 percent of GDP.


The deputy head of the Duma's budget committee, Aleksandr Pochinok, said Tuesday that a tight budget was vital, citing the crash of the ruble as a warning sign.


"Black Tuesday showed what happens when you pump unsupported money into the economy," he told a press conference. "When it all blew up, everyone understood we can't keep doing that. In this budget the government is trying to tackle the root causes of inflation.Pochinok said parliamentary approval of the budget was vital to the country's economic recovery, because it would clear the way for a $6.5 billion ruble stabilization fund from the International Monetary Fund.


"If the Duma does not adopt the budget, the central bank will have to spend $250 million every day," he said, referring to intervention to support the ruble. "When it runs out of currency reserves, the ruble will collapse -- much further than on Black Tuesday."


Parliament has flexed its muscles by insisting on more accountability on the budget. On Tuesday, the upper house, the Federation Council, overwhelmingly reaffirmed a law on the 1995 budget, which keeps the government within a strict budgetary timetable, overturning a presidential veto. The Duma had done the same two weeks before.


Council member and leading anti-corruption campaigner Yury Boldyrev said the law would stop the government from using a "second pocket" of funds as a parallel budget beyond parliament's control.


The Federation Council, Russia's Senate, rejected Aleksei Ilyushenko's third attempt to become full public prosecutor, and turned down three of six nominees for judges of the Constitutional Court.


Yeltsin spokesman Anatoly Krasikov said the president had "taken no action" after the latest chapter in the long-running saga around Ilyushenko. Although he has been in his job for eight months and been rejected three times, Yeltsin is not obliged to sack him, due to lack of clarity in the constitution.


"It looks as though we may end up having a permanently acting public prosecutor," commented deputy speaker Ramazan Abdulatipov.


Opposition deputies accuse the president of trampling on their constitutional rights."The whole world is laughing," said one of Yeltsin's most implacable adversaries, former presidential candidate Aman Tuleyev. "It could only happen in Russia that a constitution we adopted ourselves, written practically by the president himself, is broken again and again."


The chamber did get its way over the Constitutional Court, when it threw out three candidates to be new judges, including first deputy speaker of the Duma and former Kremlin aide Mikhail Mityukov.


Three judges were accepted and sworn in on Tuesday, swelling the court to 16 members out of 19. Spokesman Vitaly Smirnov said the court, which has still not started work since the new constitution was adopted last December, could start sitting immediately, but it could not elect a chairman until all places had been taken. He said this might happen within the next two weeks.