Nikolai Semyonov, a former communist functionary in charge of Grozny, repeated Moscow's official line that he would not talk to Dudayev, but said he was ready to negotiate with people close to him.
"You have to understand that Dudayev and the people around him are not the same thing," said Semyonov. "There are people around him who are there for very different reasons -- for their ideas, for material reasons, others because their relatives have been killed -- and I think we have to work with these people and make contact with them."
Many observers have said Dudayev's government is far from monolithic and contains people very willing to talk to Moscow.
Semyonov was appointed to his new job late Friday, in charge of negotiating a settlement in Chechnya, with the rank of deputy prime minister. He replaces the hawkish Nikolai Yegorov, who is in the hospital being treated for pneumonia.
Yeltsin also appointed three Chechen opposition figures, Salambek Khadzhiyev, Umar Avturkhanov and Beslan Gantemirov, to be Semyonov's deputies, and signed a decree forming a new "committee of national accord" for the republic.
Semyonov, who said he would be based in the region, announced that his first task would be to "adjust" policy on Chechnya. "First of all I have to concentrate material resources so as to help people in this difficult situation, and, after that, when I arrive there, to find ways of quickly stopping the bombing," Semyonov said.
Yegorov, in his brief tenure in Moscow, became known for a blustering, aggressive manner. On Dec. 26 he said Grozny would be captured "without a shot." But he was not a central figure in the "party of war," and he did not have a seat on the influential Kremlin Security Council. He keeps his job as deputy prime minister and nationalities minister.
Semyonov's appointment appears to signal a resurgence in influence for Sergei Shakhrai, the original architect of Moscow's Chechen policy and Yegorov's predecessor as nationalities minister.
Semyonov, a Russian born in the Ukraine, was head of the city Communist Party organization in Grozny from 1976 to 1985, before moving to Kirgizia, in Central Asia. Since 1991, he said, he has worked in a commercial firm called Matrix, although his conversion to the market did not stop him from calling the assembled journalists "comrades."
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