Yeltsin Says He Might Ignore Constitution : Russia: His supporters call statement a clear threat to dissolve legislative branch if lawmakers try to block referendum on powers.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin warned Tuesday that he might resort to unconstitutional measures if Russia’s Soviet-era legislative branch continues to usurp executive power and frustrate his free-market reforms.

Bracing for battle this month with the Congress of People’s Deputies, Yeltsin told a group of reformist lawmakers that converging political, economic and constitutional crises are putting Russia through “one of the hardest episodes of its postwar history.”

Seated at a large round table, a stern-faced Yeltsin said he has prepared three options for settling the pivotal question of who governs Russia.

The preferred option, he said, is an agreement with Congress on the separation of executive and legislative powers. If that proves elusive, Yeltsin said, he intends to go ahead with a scheduled April 11 referendum to let voters decide the issue.

“There is one final option, about which I do not want to speak,” Yeltsin added. “I do not think matters will go that far. The constitution must be respected. But if the conservatives take extreme measures to destroy Russia, other ways will have to be sought for the sake of rescuing it, for the sake of saving democracy and reforms.”

He did not elaborate, but Yeltsin supporters at the meeting called his statement a clear threat to dissolve the legislative branch and rule by decree if lawmakers try to block the referendum.

Since helping topple Soviet rule 18 months ago, Russia’s first democratically elected president has watched in frustration as former Communists dominating the Congress and the smaller standing legislature, the Supreme Soviet, delay and dilute his reforms.

They refuse, for example, to privatize farmland or to pass a government-backed bankruptcy law that would help restructure state-owned industries. In January, the Supreme Soviet raised pensions by 90% without consulting the finance minister.

Through their control of the central bank, lawmakers have undermined the government’s anti-inflation efforts by printing trillions of rubles to bail out inefficient state companies. And they are threatening to halt open bidding among all Russians for shares in privatized industries and to limit such selloffs to workers’ collectives.

Yeltsin’s hint Tuesday of an unconstitutional power grab echoed a nearly identical and equally veiled threat he made before the previous Congress last December.

That stormy two-week session forced Yeltsin to dump his reformist acting prime minister, Yegor T. Gaidar, but it ended with an agreement to call the April 11 referendum--an accord that Parliament Speaker Ruslan I. Khasbulatov now opposes.

Talks last month between Khasbulatov and Yeltsin to settle their differences got nowhere. Yeltsin then went on vacation, authorizing his spokesman to denounce Khasbulatov as impossible to deal with.

Returning this week from 12 days’ rest at his country dacha , Yeltsin began lobbying his moderate critics, including some members of the recently resurgent Communist Party, for support at the upcoming Congress. It is expected to convene March 10.

“If we refuse to divide powers, we will get either dictatorship or anarchy, both of which would be ruinous for Russia,” Yeltsin warned in a speech Sunday to members of the Civic Union, a pivotal centrist group in Congress.

Russia’s power struggle raises questions about the survival not only of market reforms but also of Russia’s cooperation with the United States on a broad range of foreign policy issues, from nuclear arms control to the former Yugoslav federation.

Conservatives in the Supreme Soviet drove that point home by attacking the START II arms reduction treaty Tuesday. Yeltsin, who signed START II here Jan. 3 with then-President George Bush, has called it a “treaty of hope.”

Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev urged lawmakers to ratify the treaty, saying Russia cannot afford the arms race that would otherwise ensue. START II would eliminate up to 17,000 strategic nuclear warheads by the year 2003, bringing the number held by each side to between 3,000 and 3,500.

But Nikolai Pavlov, a leading legislative conservative, told the hearing that Yeltsin’s pro-Western government is doomed and suggested that lawmakers “drag our heels with ratification proceedings for a year or two to see what happens in Russia then.”

“Our government says the next century will be a century without wars,” Pavlov added. “I say it will be the century of struggle for natural resources. Washington wants to make sure it can talk to Russia then from a position of strength.”