New Clashes Are Feared in Soviet Georgia : Unrest: Talks between backers and foes of the embattled president are seen as the only way out.

Heavily armed backers and opponents of Georgian President Zviad Gamsakhurdia kept an uneasy vigil Monday night at their headquarters, fearful that their escalating political battle could erupt once again into violence.

At Gamsakhurdia’s government building in downtown Tbilisi, spokesmen said they believe that only peaceful talks can relieve the acute political unrest that has beset this grape-growing Caucasus republic for more than a month. But a tank stood in the building’s courtyard and the ranks of soldiers swarming around the steps appeared to swell by the hour.

Across town, at the television center that opposition forces captured on Saturday, members of the renegade Georgian national guard manned machine guns mounted behind sandbags. Hundreds upon hundreds of self-appointed defenders roamed the street in front, toting shotguns, pistols and even turn-of-the-century Russian rifles.

“You have to defend your home,” said George Khoshtaria, formerly Georgia’s foreign minister and now a prominent member of the opposition. “Gamsakhurdia is capable of anything.”

The armed standoff, with its potential for bloodshed, is one of the most dangerous of many that have erupted on the outskirts of the Soviet Union since the collapse of central control after last month’s botched coup.

But with both sets of troops arrayed defensively and negotiations among lawmakers from each side getting under way, Georgian politicians appear to have a chance of avoiding new clashes such as Sunday morning’s melee at the opposition barricades that left more than 60 injured.

Opposition activists, many of them former allies, charged that Gamsakhurdia sided with the reactionary putsch by agreeing to disperse the national guard at the start of the coup. Accusing him of pushing Georgia’s fledgling democracy toward dictatorship, they launched a street campaign to force him to resign.

Gamsakhurdia, a former dissident himself, has found himself confronted by his own former tactics. He has tried alternatively to talk to the protesters and to disperse them, and he has mounted impressive counter-demonstrations of his own supporters.

The president also moved Monday to expand his already nearly dictatorial powers. He issued a decree forming a new Georgian National Security Council, with himself as its chief, reducing the role of the republic Parliament to a bare minimum.

With the television center in his opponents’ hands, Gamsakhurdia has taken to speaking on television from a mobile station. And his loyalists have blocked the rebels’ transmissions to the broadcast tower, so that Georgian television has shown nothing but a static picture of a historic Tbilisi church for days.

The psychological strain of the prolonged political tension claimed a life Saturday.

According to Sakinform, the official Georgian news agency, Gia Abesadze, a 35-year-old doctor, set himself on fire outside one of the opposition party headquarters after leaving a note saying that if it took a martyr to bring peace to his beloved homeland, he would take on that role. He left a wife and 10-year-old daughter, according to the report.

At the television center, sleepless guard members paced into the night, and the reception hall grew murky with the smoke of harsh Soviet cigarettes. The atmosphere resembles a more militarized version of the three-night vigil that supporters of Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin held at the Russian government building in Moscow during the coup attempt.

“We’ve been here for two days now, and we’re waiting for them to attack us,” said Lasha Koiava, a member of the opposition National Independence Party.

Tengiz Kitovani, commander and founder of the Georgian national guard, sent troops--estimated at several thousand--to help the opposition at the television center after Sunday morning’s clash. He had previously pledged that the troops, whose mission he defines as stabilizing democracy in the republic, would be used against whomever spilled blood.

Masses of Georgians from the countryside have been descending upon Tbilisi to support Gamsakhurdia. Although the political balance of forces will probably decide Gamsakhurdia’s fate as a leader, it is the military balance that has officials truly worried.