Yeltsin Declares War on Foes, Appeals to Voters

President Boris N. Yeltsin, infuriated beyond compromise, declared open political war on his conservative Parliament on Thursday, appealing directly to the Russian people to launch a nationwide referendum in support of his radical economic reforms.

Voters, Yeltsin said, should choose: Do they trust the president or the Congress to bring them out of crisis? If they choose the president, he proposed, the current Congress could be dissolved and new parliamentary elections held in March. If they choose the Congress, Yeltsin himself would stand for reelection.

“You, the voters, have to make your choice now,” Yeltsin, reading grimly from a prepared text, told a televised session of the Congress of People’s Deputies. “The fate of the reform is in your hands, the fate of the president and the Congress. I cannot possibly allow people’s sufferings to continue for decades.”

The speech sent a shock wave through the Congress. It spread to the streets outside the Kremlin.

Several thousand government supporters chanting “Yeltsin! Yeltsin!” rallied below the multicolored onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral. There they faced off against more than 1,000 Communist protesters chanting “Yeltsin is a Judas!” behind barricades 70 yards away.

Yeltsin’s bold maneuver flung the country’s fledgling democracy into its biggest political crisis since the hard-line Soviet coup attempt in August, 1991. All three branches of Russia’s young, post-Communist government were pulled into the fray. Anxiety reached the point that the ministers of defense, security and the interior all came to the Congress podium to offer public assurances that they would obey the law and not participate in any coup.

Valery Zorkin--chairman of the Constitutional Court, the supreme arbiter of legal issues affecting the nation--warned that “the Russian state is threatening to collapse” and demanded that Yeltsin and Congress leaders sit down immediately to work out a compromise. Otherwise, he threatened, he would find a way to hold them responsible, hinting that they could lose the constitutional right to remain in office.

By Thursday evening, Yeltsin had reportedly agreed to talks with Congress officials this morning. But it was unclear whether Yeltsin could reach an agreement with them after so many devastating insults had been exchanged.

The entire Russian political system seemed Thursday to degenerate into a snarling free-for-all. The vice president said that top presidential aides should be “criminally prosecuted” for manipulating Yeltsin. The Parliament chairman accused Yeltsin of humiliating him and offered to resign. And the president himself threw all diplomacy to the winds and came after the Congress with his heaviest artillery: righteous anger and open disgust.

Accusing deputies of trying to send the country back to the days of dictatorial communism, Yeltsin referred to the August coup he heroically helped to defeat: “What they failed to do in August, 1991, they have decided to try to accomplish now, with a creeping coup,” he said.

Yeltsin emphasized in his speech that he has the constitutional right to ask for a referendum, but the legality of his move remained in question. Under Russian law, he needs signatures from either one-third of the Congress’ 1,041 deputies or from 1 million Russians. But some lawmakers and experts believe that even if he gets the signatures, he has no right to interfere so directly with the legislative branch.

The Congress countered with a resolution that, if a referendum is held, it should simply propose early elections for both the Parliament and the president. Yeltsin was elected last year, and Parliament in 1990, both to five-year terms.

The tumult produced by Yeltsin’s speech evoked special fear in some deputies because of Russia’s tragic history. National television news said that some lawmakers even expected soldiers to appear to break up Parliament, as they did during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. And the prospect that the referendum could spark violence brought back memories of the bloody 1918-21 civil war.

Further deepening the confrontation was the Congress’ decision to reclaim control over the 5,000-officer special parliamentary guard; that move came in direct contradiction to a recent Yeltsin decree, subordinating the force to the Interior Ministry.

The Kremlin crisis also heightened concern that Russia, a federal patchwork of autonomous regions somewhat like American states, could fall apart just as the Soviet Union did last year. Separatists, said Bolot Ayushiev of the Aginsko-Buryatsk autonomous region, argue that “Moscow will never care about our problems, especially now that Russian leaders are busy squaring scores among themselves. We have to work out ways to improve our economy ourselves. But for this we shall need independence.”

Many of Yeltsin’s allies were delighted, however, not by the idea of a referendum but by Yeltsin’s emergence from long passivity into his old personality pattern of making forceful, unexpected decisions.

“Today he appeared as he usually behaves--as a real man,” Deputy Nikolai Vorontsov said.

In the afternoon, Yeltsin set off for what looked like a return to a classic Communist ritual, zooming off in his black limousine to Moscow’s largest automobile plant to seek support directly from the working class. Received with cheers at the grimy plant in southeastern Moscow, Yeltsin told assembled workers that conservative deputies have been planning not only to block needed economic reforms but to attempt to do away with his presidency altogether at their next Congress this April.

“No matter how long we are pushed to halt the reforms, we cannot agree,” he said to the accompaniment of clanking and hammering coming from other corners of the plant.

Times staff writer John-Thor Dahlburg contributed to this report.