The ruble bounced back Thursday to more than recover its entire loss from "Black Tuesday," after the Central Bank intervened heavily to prop up the currency's value and introduced new restrictive exchange rules to reduce speculation.


The ruble rose nearly 25 percent in trading on the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange to 2,994 per dollar in a tremendous comeback from 3,736 on Wednesday and a record low of 3,926 on Tuesday. Dealers believed, however, that the ruble was now once again overvalued.


The recovery did not help Sergei Dubinin, the acting finance minister who was fired over the ruble's collapse Wednesday. Dubinin's replacement, his pro-market first deputy Andrei Vavilov, 33, was announced Thursday.


The political fallout from the ruble crash only promised to grow as President Boris Yeltsin's press secretary, Vyacheslav Kostikov, accused sinister forces of plotting a "real financial putsch" to engineer the downfall of the ruble and the president.


Kostikov told Interfax on Thursday that "powerful commercial banks, closely connected with the extreme opposition," in particular with Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party and the Communist Party were trying to destabilize the political situation by sending the ruble into a tailspin.


Former Finance Minister Boris Fyodorov, speaking to Reuters in London, accused Yeltsin of overreacting to the ruble crash and of looking for "scapegoats" by sacking Dubinin and calling for the removal of Central Bank Chairman Viktor Gerashchenko.


The prominent economist and presidential hopeful Grigory Yavlinsky said much the same, attributing the ruble crash to the government's lack of financial sophistication.


"The truth is," he told Reuters, "Russia is a banana republic. A very big banana republic with nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons."


Bankers said Thursday that the rouble was now too high and agreed that a realistic level would be between 3,100 and 3,300.


"The authorities always manage to push too hard. This time by both raising the rouble rate and by sacking bosses. This will not do any good," Reuters reported one dealer as saying.


On the streets there was confusion as retailers grappled with the currency's wild fluctuations.


Many shopkeepers who had spent Tuesday raising their prices were frantically scribbling new price tags once again Thursday evening, this time cutting prices back down to size.


Pizza Hut marked slices down from 5,700 rubles to 4,500, almost reaching the pre-crash price of 4,100, because demand had fallen sharply, salespeople said. The candy store Sweet Sweet Way closed down to lower all its prices.


Others were playing a waiting game. "It depends on our suppliers," said Dmitri Gagaryan, 35, a kiosk operator who hiked his Snickers bars to 1500 rubles on Tuesday and has not yet knocked them down.


He said customers, too, were holding off on purchases. "Everybody is waiting to see -- will it fall all the way or not?"


Currency dealers attributed the ruble's renewed strength to a huge initial supply of dollars 361.15 million, much of which was injected by the Central Bank. Maksim Stoklitsky, currency dealer at Most-Bank, estimated the Central Bank spent over dollars 100 million to help create a huge gap between supply and demand.


Igor Doronin, currency expert at MICEX, confirmed that the Central Bank intervened heavily during Thursday trading, saying the bank must have provided a third of initial dollar supply.


The ruble's comeback has also become possible thanks to new restrictive rules, which the Central Bank issued to limit speculative trade on the exchange.


Under the rules, which were implemented for the first time Thursday, dealers are only allowed to use rubles already deposited at the exchange to pay for dollars. Before, they were given 48 hours to pay for transactions, which allowed them to make profits on the ruble's sharp falls by paying for dollars in devalued rubles.


Experts and dealers said tough statements from Russia's top officials, including Yeltsin, had also contributed to the ruble's miraculous recovery. On Wednesday, Yeltsin had described the fall of the ruble as a "threat to national security" while Central Bank chairman Viktor Gerashchenko pledged to the State Duma that the bank would soon reverse the ruble's fall.


"The ruble has certainly profited from government promises," said Stoklitsky of Most-Bank.


Doronin of MICEX said dealers rushed to sell dollars at the highest rate possible in anticipation of the further strengthening of the ruble Thursday. At the same time the new exchange rules discouraged most speculators, said Kirill Tolcheyev, dealer at Menatep bank.


"Who would bother playing on the exchange, if the new rules require you to deposit rubles today, take part in trading tomorrow and get dollars only a day after tomorrow?" Tolcheyev said, adding that the new rules could eventually force the trade off the exchange to the interbank market.


Mstislav Afanasyav, deputy director of the government Center for Economic Reform, welcomed the new exchange rules, saying that currency market crisis was to a large extent caused by the lack of regulations. "This is a timely and justified measure," Afanasyev said.


"The measures could be useful," agreed a top-ranked Western economist in Moscow, who spoke on a condition of anonymity. The economist, however, warned that the government's primary task should be addressing the economic factors behind the ruble's fall.


"In the end, government economic policy makes the currency weak or strong," he said.