Rally Calls for Giving Yeltsin ‘Vote of Trust’

Frustrated by the slowness of Russia’s political and economic reforms, supporters of President Boris N. Yeltsin called at a rally Sunday for a national referendum on granting him unlimited powers in a “vote of trust” and, at the same time, suspending the elected Parliament.

Although the rally was not large by Moscow standards, drawing about 25,000 to the walls of the Kremlin, its organizers clearly intended it as the start of a campaign to win for Yeltsin the authority to implement by decree all the fundamental reforms that he says are now blocked by conservative lawmakers.

Father Gleb Yakunin, a leading radical in the Congress of People’s Deputies, said voters should be asked, “Do you trust President Yeltsin, and are you ready to give him extraordinary powers, concurrently suspending the work of the Congress of People’s Deputies and the legislature for a year?”

“We must act now,” Ilya I. Zaslavksy, a leader of the influential movement Democratic Russia, told the rally. “We must hold the referendum. We must tell the government to carry out reforms in a more decisive way.”

Other speakers called for a purge of officials who had belonged to the Communist Party and failed to resign before the unsuccessful coup d’etat led by Communist hard-liners last August.

They also called for further protests to isolate those political leaders who, although recognized as democrats, have criticized Yeltsin’s policies, and they targeted for removal Ruslan Khasbulatov, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, who opposes a strong presidency at the cost of a weakened Parliament.

Yeltsin, although mysteriously absent from the political scene for the past week, is likely to welcome this initiative when he addresses the Congress of People’s Deputies, the national Parliament, at its close this week.

Not only is Democratic Russia Yeltsin’s political base, but his closest aides have talked for several weeks about a national referendum to get a new mandate for reform and thus overcome the conservatism of lawmakers elected three years ago when the Communist Party still ruled.

Yeltsin’s supporters on Sunday, however, spoke of power so vast that it would be virtually unchecked by either the legislative or the judicial branches of Russia’s embryonic government, and the “vote of trust” received in the referendum would effectively supplant both the old Soviet-era constitution and drafts of a replacement.

Under the proposal outlined by speakers at the rally, Yeltsin would simply rule, although presumably with the participation of radical reformers like themselves, in order to pull the country through the necessary changes.

One measure of real progress, Yakunin said, would be individual ownership of land, a crucially important step toward a free-market economy as well as a politically liberating measure for millions of peasants who, like medieval serfs, remain tied to their state and collective farms.

Because of the conservatives’ effective veto over any constitutional change, the Congress of People’s Deputies has been unable even to take up land reform, despite its fundamental importance, during its current meeting, now starting its third week.

“It took the Congress 12 days just to discover that this country will be called Russia,” Yuri A. Chernichenko, chairman of the Peasants’ Party and a leading agrarian reformer, told the rally, mocking the prolonged debate on the country’s constitutional name. “But even that’s a lie!

“This country will become Russia only after its citizens own land. But this Congress denied the Russian people the right to their land.”

Chernichenko commented later in an interview, “The Congress of People’s Deputies should either dissolve itself for its total impotence, though one can’t afford to hope for that, or a referendum should be called to decide who is superior--president or Parliament.”

Not only has the 1,046-member Congress, which is dominated by former Communists, refused to support critical reforms, but it almost caused Yeltsin’s Cabinet to resign last week. On Saturday, it endorsed a draft new constitution trimming Yeltsin’s powers, but then postponed consideration of the draft even though such a basic law is needed for the country’s transformation.

Under the present constitution, the president may call for a referendum on political questions, but Yeltsin has not decided whether the issues and the timing are right, according to Russian political commentators.

Popular anger was widespread at the rally Sunday, with many people saying they felt betrayed by the deputies they elected two years ago.

Vyacheslav M. Golikov, the chairman of the Council of Kuzbass Workers’ Committees, an independent trade union movement in Russia’s richest coal field, said that the land ownership question is only one of several touchstone issues on which conservatives in the Congress have been blocking reform.

“This Congress is an organ incapable of deciding the fate of Russia and incapable of taking responsible decisions,” Golikov said in an interview. “It should be dissolved, and a new, smaller Parliament of professional politicians should be elected in its place.”

Alexei A. Borzov, 51, who described himself simply as a worker, was equally adamant. “This Congress has no right to exist,” he said. “It is dangerous and destructive. We need a small Parliament and a strong president instead.”

And Nina A. Lyakhotskaya, 50, a dentist, commented: “The Congress is simply awful. It has done nothing to improve the situation. The only thing this Congress is capable of is to block the reforms. The Congress must be dissolved, and the sooner the better. . . .

“The reforms are skidding now because of these deputies, most of whom are former party apparatchiks who want to sabotage the reforms in every way possible.”

Moscow’s Channel One television and Russian news agencies quoted police as saying that as many as 100,000 people participated in the pro-Yeltsin rally, but less than a fifth of Moscow’s vast Manezh Square, which has held as many as a quarter-million people when tightly packed, was filled.

The pro-Yeltsin rally was met by a much smaller gathering of 3,000 Communist sympathizers, who appeared ready for a full-fledged confrontation until separated by a shoulder-to-shoulder line of policemen and persuaded to retire to Red Square.

Sergei Loiko, a researcher in The Times’ Moscow bureau, contributed to this story.