Yeltsin Braces as His Foes Rally Forces Across Russia

With President Boris N. Yeltsin already on the defensive, Russia’s hard-line opposition staged its most coordinated show of strength yet Saturday, holding protest rallies in 60 cities across the country and gathering its disparate leaders into a new National Salvation Front.

Yeltsin summoned his Cabinet for urgent talks on “the state of the country,” official agencies reported, sparking widespread speculation that he was deciding which ministers would have to be sacrificed to public discontent.

There was no word from the meeting Saturday night, but some national media even predicted that the Russian president could soon jettison the entire Cabinet, a group of bright young economists he himself has accused of caring too much about theory and not enough about people.

Tens of thousands of protesters, organized mainly by labor unions, demonstrated in cities from Vladivostok to St. Petersburg on Saturday to demand the Cabinet’s resignation and an end to its attempts to push Russia toward a market-driven economy.

“We absolutely must get rid of this illegitimate government that came to power without people’s support,” unemployed architect Nadezhda Yuyukina said as she stood among about 5,000 other largely elderly demonstrators in the freezing cold of Moscow’s October Square. “They must go away in disgrace. What we have now is chaos.”

About 2,000 delegates, gathered at the founding congress of the National Salvation Front, applauded as organizer Ilya Konstantinov told them that the new group must “struggle for power, and struggle for power in the nearest future.”

The new front “must be capable of changing the course of history in our country,” said Konstantinov, a member of Parliament.

The upsurge in opposition activity came just days after Yeltsin lost his bid to postpone a session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the country’s highest legislative body, that is expected to take him to task for failures in his reform program. He rebuked lawmakers afterward for “sliding too far to the right” and said he would not forget their disrespect.

But he was nonetheless clearly on the defensive, and the prestigious Nezavisimaya Gazeta, or Independent Newspaper, headlined its Saturday edition: “Yeltsin will have to change his team very soon--fully or partially, that is the question.”

Critical remarks Yeltsin made in a recent speech to Parliament have focused attention on Foreign Trade Minister Pyotr Aven and Economics Minister Andrei Nechayev, both of whom were singled out for censure.

Most scenarios hold that Yeltsin will replace them with choices that will please conservatives in a preemptive move before the Dec. 1 congress.

That would not be enough to satisfy leaders of the National Salvation Front.

In speech after speech, they condemned the poverty and injustice they said Yeltsin’s reforms have brought Russia and demanded that the entire Cabinet resign.

The front must not resort to violence, they said, but if Yeltsin refuses to change his policies, it must bring about his resignation and a premature round of new elections to the presidency and Parliament.

“We must act within the law, but act more decisively than ever,” Konstantinov said, “because full collapse . . . is only a few months away.”

Alexander Prokhanov, editor of the nationalist newspaper Den, or Day, said that life in Russia is now good “only for rats and lies.”

“The democrats in the city governments do nothing but drink and steal,” he said.

“Our writers die of hunger. Our icons are stolen from our museums. Our girls are taught to be prostitutes and our boys taught to be speculators.”

Yeltsin’s nationalist opposition has repeatedly tried to organize itself into a coordinated bloc and failed, and although front leaders have gathered together an impressive array of politicians and ideologues, it was not clear that they would do any better.

Already, cracks could be seen between the “right-wing” or nationalist opposition and the “left-wing” or old-style Communist opposition, with left-wing leaders pointedly staying away from the front’s congress and running their own rallies instead.

And despite the opposition’s growing strength, Russian commentators continued to put their money on Yeltsin, having seen him pull through many a bad situation using pure political skill.

“In ancient Sparta, there were two kinds of czars--one for peace and one for war,” analyst Nikolai Svanidze said on Russian Television’s nightly news. “Boris Yeltsin would have been a warring czar. In situations of sharp conflict, he demonstrates his best qualities, making quick and definite decisions.

“Right now, that’s the kind of situation we’re in,” Svanidze said.