Yeltsin Tries to Soothe Coup Fears : Politics: Russian leader says his enemies have ‘no support among the people.’ But rumors call attention to his own drop in popularity.

Seeking to quell a rash of rumors that a new Russian coup is in the works, President Boris N. Yeltsin reassured his compatriots on Saturday that there will be no repeat of last August’s attempted putsch.

“I rule out the possibility of a coup,” Yeltsin told reporters, adding that this time, in a crunch, the defense minister, the security chief and the prime minister will be on the president’s side.

Communists, conservatives and ultranationalists who would like to overthrow him “have no support among the people,” Yeltsin said. “That’s the main thing. And so they’ll never dare attempt a putsch. They don’t have the power. And they also don’t have someone like (former KGB chairman Vladimir) Kryuchkov to organize it.”

For all of Yeltsin’s reassurances, however, the very fact that coup rumors have begun to spread--as they did in the waning months of former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s rule--calls attention to the Russian government’s eroding support and its deepening internal problems.

In part, Yeltsin’s own administration is to blame. The most worrying warning of an impending coup came from Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev in an interview with the newspaper Izvestia last week.

Lashing out at the nationalists who are pushing Yeltsin to intervene when Russians are caught in ethnic conflicts across the former Soviet Union, Kozyrev said that resorting to force “will certainly give a free hand to the army and state security, which will then, sooner or later, cast aside the democratic trappings which impede them.”

Gorbachev fell into just such a trap, Kozyrev said, and the hard-liners tried to dump him as soon as they believed they no longer needed him.

“All this can be repeated if we make concessions to these forces and compromise with them,” Kozyrev cautioned.

His warning reverberated with particular force because it echoed Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze’s prescient predictions of impending dictatorship when he resigned in December, 1990, just eight months before the attempted coup.

On Saturday, Yeltsin did not hide his annoyance with Kozyrev, saying he had told the foreign minister that “if you want to be a prophet like Shevardnadze, then act like Shevardnadze. That is, he made a statement on a putsch and resigned.”

But Kozyrev is not the only member of the administration to predict that dire political events lie ahead.

Sergei Shakhrai, Yeltsin’s top legal adviser, painted a scenario last week in which the upcoming Constitutional Court hearing on Yeltsin’s decree banning the Communist Party will become the basis for impeachment proceedings.

If the court, which convenes Tuesday, rules that Yeltsin’s decree was unconstitutional, the president’s opponents will have grounds to call an extraordinary congress to move for impeachment “and to try in this quasi-legal way to oust those in power,” Shakhrai told the popular Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

Gorbachev has frequently been asked lately whether he sees the same kind of pre-coup situation developing today as that which preceded the events of last August. He usually replies that the main danger he foresees is one of general popular unrest, which could lead to the rise of Adolf Hitler-type populists.

Even he, however, appears to share with much of the press and the population a sense of foreboding.

Asked at a recent group interview whether he expects a new coup, he answered a question with a question, asking, “Why? You feel that something is being prepared?”

“I’ve had that feeling for a long time,” one Russian reporter said.

“It feels like we’re on the brink of the threat of fascism,” said another.

Gorbachev, whose relations with his old rival Yeltsin remain barely civil, has also implied that Yeltsin himself may be the one to introduce dictatorship in Russia.

“The way I see it,” he told the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, “some of the people in the president’s following are prompting him to move toward dictatorship under the guise of resolute measures.”

If such assessments from Gorbachev and top Russian officials can be considered warnings, a recent blast against Yeltsin from the Constitutional Court almost appeared to be an outright threat.

The court, newly created to fulfill a role similar to that of the Supreme Court in the United States, is only supposed to serve as arbiter on questions of constitutionality.

Last week, however, it issued an official declaration, warning that “the constitution of our state is in jeopardy” and that “increasingly, appeals are being made for the forcible overthrow of constitutional power.”

In what some officials construed as a threat to impeach Yeltsin and bring down his Cabinet, the court said that “failure by supreme state officials to fulfill their obligations confronts the Constitutional Court with the necessity to consider the question of their constitutional liability.”

But despite all these grim scenarios and warnings, Yeltsin remains his blustery self.

He emphasized Saturday that he will continue to push ahead with acting Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar’s tough economic reforms, even if they lend strength to his opposition.

“Of course, unpopular measures are being undertaken and this is being used by those forces,” he said. “The people are having a difficult time and they sometimes express their dissatisfaction. But to play on this dissatisfaction today is to betray Russia, to my mind.”

Yeltsin also stayed firm in his defiance of International Monetary Fund attempts to bully Russia into going even faster with its economic reforms--in particular, by freeing state-controlled prices on fuel, which would set off a new spiral of inflation.

If it comes right down to it, he said, Russia will forgo the $24 billion in aid it expects from the West rather than give in and apply IMF models that do not fit Russia.

“To force us to our knees for this loan--no!” he said. “Russia is still a great power.”

Yeltsin said he plans to ask the world’s seven richest industrial nations at their meeting in Munich this week to let Russia and other former Soviet republics put off for two years repaying the former Soviet Union’s $68-billion debt.