Plagued by spy scandals and an explosive crime rate, President Boris Yeltsin on Thursday appointed a new head of Russia's counterintelligence service and launched a program to wage war on crime.


Sergei Stepashin, a young and smooth-talking former Interior Ministry official, was named to head the Federal Counterintelligence Service, even as it is engaged with the United States in a bundle of tit-for-tat spy exposes.


Stepashin, 42, succeeds Nikolai Golushko, who was fired last week after he allowed the release of seven jailed opposition leaders under a parliament amnesty, despite being asked by Yeltsin to find a way to prevent it.


The appointment of Stepashin, a relative outsider in counterintelligence, indicates that Yeltsin is determined to regain control of the former KGB and to force through a radical trimming of the service.


Alexander Mikhailov, a spokesman for the counterintelligence service, said Stepashin would continue a deep restructuring of the former KGB that was begun by Yeltsin last fall, after the parliament uprising of Oct. 3-4.


Yeltsin at that time split the former Security Ministry into a separate counterintelligence service, headed by Golushko and responsible directly to the president, and several other sections that were distributed among other government agencies.


Golushko, a career KGB officer, was left with a drastically reduced writ and has since made it clear that he opposed the restructuring.


Stepashin had been Golushko's first deputy, but unlike his boss, made his career in the Interior Ministry.


Stepashin has been involved with the security services, however, since the attempted coup of August 1991 when he was made deputy security minister. He also headed the defense and security committee of the former Supreme Soviet, where he was considered loyal to the president.


Stepashin's appointment comes amid a wave of Cold War-style spy scandals, sparked by the American exposure of an alleged Russian super-spy in Washington.


Security and crime have leapt to the top of Yeltsin's agenda since the success of the populist appeals of Vladimir Zhirinovsky in December's elections.


A session of the Security Council, which is chaired by Yeltsin, adopted its first Federal Program on Fighting Crime Thursday, part of a campaign the president promised during a state of the nation address last week.


"It is necessary to convince Russians that the state is able to cope with the criminality," Yeltsin told the Security Council in a televised session. "I hope the federal program will become a turning-point and a socially important document in the difficult job of law enforcement."


Yeltsin sharply criticized Russian law enforcement agencies, saying that their inefficiency had led organized crime gangs to believe that they could expand their business unhindered.


Vladimir Myasechenko, spokesman for the Security Council, said the program, adopted for 1994 and 1995, focused on organized crime and terrorism.


According to police statistics, there are several thousand organized criminal gangs operating in Russia, while the number of grave crimes -- murders, rapes and hired killings -- increased 30 percent in 1993 against 1992.


"The program envisages close cooperation among both special services and all governmental structures," Myasechenko said. "The whole government with all its departments will be involved in the fight against crime."


Myasechenko said Yeltsin would appoint a coordinator for the program within days but would oversee it personally. The funds for the new program had not yet been allotted in the government's draft budget, he said.


"The program is very expensive," Myasechenko said. "The total price equals several hundreds of billions of rubles."


In his statement to the Security Council, Yeltsin reiterated his tough stance against the opposition leaders, including former Vice President Alexander Rutskoi and the former parliament speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov, who were released from Lefortovo prison last Saturday.


"Those who were granted amnesty by the State Duma will be arrested again as soon they start any political activity that harms the security of the Russian state," Yeltsin said of his former political foes.


Khasbulatov on Thursday appeared to water down earlier promises that he would retire from politics.


In an interview in Pravda, Khasbulatov said he had been forced to resign and was determined to defend his honor against attacks from his opponents.


He did not elaborate, but attacked Yeltsin and his allies, calling them "people without any moral principles."


"A civil war is taking place in our country, albeit subdued, and it will continue as long as Yeltsin stays in power," Khasbulatov said.


Yeltsin's supporters have expressed dismay at his failure to prevent Khasbulatov and Rutskoi's release , seeing it as a sign that he has lost his grip on the country. Nezavisimaya Gazeta on Thursday printed its monthly opinion poll of 50 political analysts, in which most said they thought Yeltsin had been bypassed by Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, as the nation's leading politician.