Election to Fill Yeltsin’s Old Post Turns Into a ‘Tiresome Marathon’

Despite Boris N. Yeltsin’s overwhelming victory in the first race ever for a Russian president, democratic lawmakers in the Soviet Union’s largest republic failed for a fourth time Monday to elect a Yeltsin ally to fill his old post as the chairman of the legislature.

The Russian Federation’s democrats have been so divided that although they control the Parliament, a conservative Communist Party candidate, Sergei N. Baburin, won more votes than the liberal candidate, Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, in four rounds of voting.

But because no candidate received more than 50% of the vote, the election was expected to go into a fifth round today.

When Yeltsin was inaugurated last week as Russian Federation president, he vacated the post of chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet, or legislature. His first deputy, Khasbulatov, was expected to easily take the post during an extraordinary meeting of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the federation Parliament.

But the Parliament has been deadlocked for five days in what the official Soviet news agency Tass termed a “tiresome election marathon race.”

Some 150 democratic legislators have been repeatedly refusing to vote for anyone because they oppose Khasbulatov, whom they accuse of having an “authoritarian style of chairing the Supreme Soviet,” Tass said.

If a conservative wins the election, Yeltsin could find it difficult to implement his plans to radically liberalize the federation’s economy and political structure.