NEWS ANALYSIS : When Yeltsin Bluffed Angry Parliament, All Russia Could Have Been the Loser

When he was just starting out in construction, a young Boris N. Yeltsin neglected to secure a large crane to its rails and woke up in horror that night to find it sliding toward a long drop and certain destruction. In a flash, Yeltsin ran outside in his underwear, climbed into the crane’s cab in the dark and managed to stop it inches from the end of the rails.

That, columnist Alexander Barinov said Sunday, is just about what the Russian president also did over the weekend, stepping in to stave off a horrendous political crisis that he himself had helped create.

“Of course, it would have been better to hook up the crane in the first place,” said Barinov, who writes for the Baikal Worker newspaper. “But that’s his character--he’s a hero. He heats up the situation to the maximum and sees what comes of it.”

What came of the worst Kremlin crisis since the 1991 coup attempt was a complex compromise that promised Russians a modicum of political stability until April, when they will be asked to vote in a referendum on their new constitution.

But the crisis also served as a chilling reminder of just how shaky Russia’s new democracy is, and just how vulnerable it is to disruption by any of its key figures, including its reformist president.

The deal that Yeltsin cut with leaders of the conservative Congress of People’s Deputies allowed the Russian president to renominate his choice for prime minister, radical economist Yegor T. Gaidar. The Congress is expected to vote on new nominations today, and deputies gave Gaidar good odds.

It was the 1,041-member Congress’ initial rejection of Gaidar, who has overseen Russia’s difficult economic reforms for the last year, that set off Yeltsin’s angry decision Thursday to ask for a referendum meant to rid him of the Congress.

Even if Gaidar stays on only as acting prime minister, Yeltsin’s ploy will have succeeded to some extent. He managed to freeze the Parliament’s attempts to take more power at his expense and appeared to give up little in return, agreeing only to fire a close adviser, withdraw his call for the referendum and to nominate other candidates, as well as Gaidar, for prime minister today.

On Sunday, Yeltsin’s supporters were already claiming victory in this skirmish of their long-running battle with the former Communist conservatives of the Congress. About 5,000 demonstrators, waving Russian tricolor flags and carrying Yeltsin portraits, gathered near Gorky Park to show their support for the compromise and their president.

“If Boris Yeltsin remains firm and persistent, democracy in Russia is sure to win,” Deputy Gleb Yakunin exulted during the snowy protest.

But whether or not Yeltsin won--and that was disputed even by Yeltsin himself, who refused to talk about victory or defeat in the compromise--the fact remains that the Russian president took an unthinkable risk.

On Thursday, when Yeltsin announced he was calling for a referendum asking Russians whether they supported him or the Congress, he set off a spasm of political tension unmatched since the coup attempt.

One Russian reporter at the Kremlin called home to tell his family not to venture outside that day. Much of the country glued itself to radio and television, as it had during the riveting revelations of early glasnost (openness) . And thousands of protesters faced off in high-strung opposing crowds that appeared to be waiting only for an excuse to turn violent.

Yeltsin even appeared to be risking his own five-year term as president by stipulating that if the people did not affirm their trust in him in the referendum, he would agree to premature elections. If they did choose him over the Congress, he proposed, then early Congress elections should be held.

In effect, he was saying that the people’s will could be used as an argument to junk virtually any element of the country’s political system--but preferably his own nemesis, the Congress. Nothing was graven in stone.

If the referendum went ahead, given the low popularity ratings of both Congress and president, “there will be anarchy,” Deputy Anatoly Leontiev of Omsk had predicted.

Even some of Yeltsin’s stronger supporters were openly dismayed by his go-for-broke approach, wishing aloud that he had continued to work behind the scenes for solutions and expressing worries about what one ally called “political insanity.”

Was it all a bluff?

It looks that way now, said Victor Vodolazhsky, an editor of the weekly Nedelya news magazine.

And Yeltsin, he said sadly, did not appear to think about the welfare of his own populace when he decided to make his audacious move.

“The principal loser was the simple people,” Vodolazhsky said, noting that the melee in Moscow exacerbated conflicts between governors and their legislatures across the country. “As the saying goes, ‘When the nobles quarrel, it’s the peasant’s hair that gets pulled.’ ”

In the end, Vodolazhsky said, the entire political system came off the worse because Yeltsin showed once again that he was “explosive and unmanageable” and Congress looked like an absolute circus.

“People just don’t know whom to trust anymore,” Vodolazhsky said.