MOSCOW — Russia faced a snowballing currency crisis on Tuesday that prompted an unusual outburst of public bickering among some top presidential allies, as President Vladimir V. Putin struggled to tame events that had the potential to wreck his reputation as the leader who brought stability and prosperity to this country.

Even a middle-of-the-night increase in interest rates to 17 percent failed to reverse the slide of the ruble, as panicked investors drove the currency past 80 to the dollar, a historic low, before it rebounded late in the day to 68. The ruble has lost 50 percent of its value since the beginning of the year. Russian consumers afraid of losing their savings, as happened in a financial crisis in 1998, flooded stores, rushing to dump rubles that seemed to shrink in worth by the minute.

The economy was not yet in danger of freezing in a liquidity crisis, economists and other analysts noted, nor was Russia as yet facing a repeat of 1998, when the government could not pay its debts. But many acknowledged that a financial crisis could develop at lightning speed if global markets that already distrust the Kremlin lost confidence in its ability to contain the damage.

It is a real panic,” said Kirill Rogov, an independent political and economic analyst who is often critical of the Putin administration. “The ruble is being devalued by 5 or 6 percent every day, and nobody knows how to stop it.”

Mr. Rogov said that his own family members had been forced to give up their usual Alpine ski vacation this year because of the expense, and might choose Georgia or Chechnya instead.

The crisis has been driven by a sharp decline in the price of oil, the country’s main export, investors’ loss of confidence in the government and a confrontational foreign policy that yielded Western economic sanctions after the Ukraine crisis — factors that analysts said were unlikely to change soon.

A similar run on the ruble in 2009 halted abruptly after the central bank raised interest rates to 13 percent, causing a steep recession with an 8 percent drop in growth but halting the panic. Oil prices also rebounded quickly that year.

This year, the interest rate increase seemed only to scare investors, confirming their fears that the government does not know how to handle the crisis. “The main impression is a picture of weakness as the government does not know what to do,” Mr. Rogov said. “It cannot stop the panic, it cannot stop the devaluation.”

Further dimming prospects, analysts are predicting that oil prices will stay low until at least 2016, because of weak demand and continued increases in production in North America. Even before raising interest rates, the central bank had said the economy could shrink by 4.7 percent next year if oil stayed around $60 a barrel.

In addition to the oil and currency markets, analysts were focusing on the financial situation and the possibility of corporate and bank failures. “Because of this panic and uncertainty, there could be a liquidity crisis in the coming weeks and months,” said Sergei M. Guriev, a prominent economist who fled into exile last year.

There were no signs of a broad public panic, no lines at banks or money exchange points. But that might have been because some of them were charging as much as 100 rubles per dollar. (News reports suggested that there might be a run on new signs for exchange shops because the current ones are designed for two digits, not three.)

Given the level of corruption and bribery here, not to mention the congenital distrust of state institutions, in normal times all manner of Russians stow rubles at home. Now, most are anxious to dispose of those stashes any way they can. One Kazakh man was seen walking around a Jaguar dealership, which like several luxury brands had run out of cars, with a little rolling suitcase full of cash. Sales were up 50 percent this month, a manager said.

Young urban professionals in Moscow earn roughly 80,000 rubles a month on average. Before the crisis, that was worth $2,500, plenty of money for them to meet basic living expenses and enough to still spend free time in Europe. As of Tuesday, those salaries had dwindled to around $1,000, leaving those who had already bought airplane tickets wondering how to pay for the rest of the vacation.

At the Apple store in the AviaPark mall, Sergey Akimov, a 22-year-old technology worker, said his dreams of foreign travel had evaporated, so he was spending the money on a new iPhone 6, selling in rubles for considerably less than its American price of $650 because of the rapidly depreciating exchange rate. “This is instead of my vacation,” he said, smiling. The store raised prices during the day as the currency slid.

As always, many Russians responded to the crisis with stoicism and some dark humor. “If you could change anything about your past, what would it be?” went one joke. “Rubles” was the response

The exchange rate became the fixation of Moscow and beyond. Mikhael Lisnyak, a computer programmer, recently put up a website called zenrus.ru, meant for his friends to track the second-by-second changes in the value of the dollar, the ruble and oil simultaneously. The site crashed on Tuesday because the servers could not handle the hundreds of thousands of people trying to look at the whirling numbers.

Mr. Putin did not comment publicly on Tuesday, although he is scheduled to hold his marathon annual news conference on Thursday. Much of the official debate swirled around demands for the resignation of Elvira Nabiullina, the chairwoman of the central bank. One Communist deputy in parliament accused her of deliberate “sabotage,” an old Stalinist favorite.

State-run television, reflecting the Kremlin point of view, focused much of its substantial coverage on explaining why the central bank was doing the right thing. For her part, Ms. Nabiullina explained that Russia had to get used to living within its means.

“We have to learn to live in a different zone, to orient ourselves more towards our own sources of financing, projects and to give a chance to import substitution,” she said on Russian television.

While a weak currency generally invites investment over the long run, foreign investors have grown leery of the Russian market because of the culture of crony capitalism surrounding Mr. Putin and his inner circle, and the perception that they bend the rules to suit their purposes. Aleksei L. Kudrin, a former finance minister who has been mentioned as a possible new prime minister to address the crisis, wrote on Twitter that “the fall of the ruble and the stock market is not just a reaction to the low price of oil and to sanctions, but also due to a lack of confidence in the government’s economic policy.”

He specifically singled out recent financial machinations surrounding Rosneft, the oil giant run by Igor I. Sechin, a former Soviet intelligence agent like Mr. Putin and one of the president’s closest friends.

With Rosneft unable to refinance debt because of Western sanctions restricting business with Russia, it turned to the central bank, which agreed to an opaque deal that, to the markets, appeared as if the central bank had simply printed rubles to prop up the company. The ruble’s slide, Mr. Kudrin said, began after the deal was announced.

Mr. Sechin called Mr. Kudrin’s suggestion that the deal prompted the sell-off “a provocation” and denied that any rubles borrowed by the company on Friday had been converted into hard currency.

Kremlin supporters, and they are legion, blamed Washington for the entire crisis, saying it was conspiring with the Saudis to bring down the price of oil and wreck the Russian economy in an attempt to overthrow Mr. Putin. Oil constitutes more than 60 percent of Russian exports.

“The ruble decline is a result of the financial war that Washington called against Moscow, a hybrid war,” said Sergei Markov, a political analyst close to the Kremlin. Even he conceded that it would be a challenge for Mr. Putin to maintain his popularity in the face of falling living standards after overseeing nearly 15 years of prosperity.

Mr. Putin has based his political appeal on the promise of broadly shared prosperity and a rebuilt sense of national pride, both of which are threatened by the recent economic reversals. Nevertheless, both supporters and the president’s opponents said it was far too soon to assess any long-term political impact.

Further economic turmoil surely lies ahead, with much of the debate focused on how deep a recession will be. Many analysts suggested that Russia could soon impose currency controls to exert more government supervision over the import and export of dollars.

Russian companies, including many of the state-run giants, owe some $650 billion to Western banks that they cannot refinance because of sanctions. Russia cannot pay with its reserves, estimated at a maximum of $400 billion, but probably far less than that, after accounting for all obligations. In the past, Russia has turned to the International Monetary Fund for help, but that would be a blow to Mr. Putin’s stated goal of preserving Russia as a strong, independent entity. Some of the companies that must repay a total of $130 billion in foreign debt next year are run by longtime associates of Mr. Putin, and if printing rubles is the bailout plan for them, the ruble may be in for even greater trouble.