Court Rules Yeltsin Erred in Banning Salvation Front : Russia: The tribunal also voids a Kremlin order prohibiting a Communist group from holding a congress this weekend.

Russia’s Constitutional Court ruled Friday that Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin overstepped his legal authority by banning the National Salvation Front, an alliance of several thousand unrepentant Communists and right-wing nationalists.

By an 11-2 vote, the nation’s highest tribunal declared that Yeltsin’s decree last Oct. 28 violated the extremist group’s constitutional guarantees of free association.

“The right of citizens to form associations can be restricted only by the court based on the law,” court chairman Valery D. Zorkin said, reading the decision to reporters and jubilant Front militants.

In a separate ruling, the court overruled an order by Yeltsin’s Justice Ministry prohibiting another group of Communists from holding a congress this weekend to reconstitute the party that ruled the former Soviet Union.

Together the two decisions imposed clear limits on Yeltsin’s power at a time when it is under assault from Russia’s other branch of government, the legislature. The rulings could make it easier for extremists seeking to capitalize on widespread discontent over the country’s economic free fall.

Yeltsin last year declared that the Front posed a “terrible danger” to Russia by calling for “the overthrow of lawful authorities.”

The group, which claims 5,000 members in Moscow, stands for rolling back Yeltsin’s radical free-market reforms, resurrecting the Soviet Union and protecting Russian culture from pollution by Western ideas. Many of its adherents hold anti-Semitic views.

Front activists say they are campaigning peacefully to replace Yeltsin’s government. But at their founding assembly last October, army Col. Stanislav Terekhov told delegates there was also a “third phase” being planned “which I will not talk about here.”

That dark hint may have prompted Yeltsin’s ban, later broadened to allow the prohibition of any group seeking to overthrow the constitutional system by force or to stir up ethnic or social strife.

The court said Friday that the government could ask the judiciary to ban any group on such grounds but could not do so unilaterally.

The Front has ignored Yeltsin’s ban and continued to organize without much harassment by the police. Vladimir Isakov, one of several lawmakers among its founders, hailed Friday’s ruling as “the first battle we have won.”

It was the court’s fifth ruling against Yeltsin’s government since the 13 judges were elected to life terms by Russia’s Parliament in October, 1991, two months before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin has generally obeyed court rulings.

The Constitutional Court’s most controversial decision, announced last Nov. 30 after a six-month trial, upheld Yeltsin’s right to divest the Communist Party of state assets but not to bar it from political activity.

As a result, several groups of former Communists announced that 600 delegates from across Russia would convene today for a two-day “unity and restoration” congress at a secret venue near Moscow. The Justice Ministry announced Thursday that the gathering was illegal.

The court said, however, that its November ruling gave party organizations “a right to resume legal activities and unite, notably convene congresses.”

Zorkin, a Communist-turned-democrat, has emerged as a judicial activist seeking to institute the rule of law.