Russians Draft Measure to Cut Yeltsin’s Powers

Leaders of Russia’s Parliament drafted a law Wednesday that would chop Boris N. Yeltsin’s state role down to that of the “Queen of England” even as the president, preaching conciliation, ran instead into a buzz saw of hostility from conservative legislators.

Yeltsin offered a counterproposal to make peace with the legislative branch after months of bitter squabbling, but his text was rejected at nighttime parleys that grew so disagreeable that his representatives walked out.

Called back to Moscow from the far-flung regions of Russia for an emergency session to arbitrate the country’s paralyzing struggle for power, members of the Congress of People’s Deputies were in a sullen mood on the first day. They quickly rejected two requests from Yeltsin, to alter the agenda and to form a “conciliatory commission.”

However, they also handily turned back a hard-line, pro-Communist faction’s efforts to add to the agenda an item that its sponsors described as “a first step in the impeachment process.”

The vote was a crucial litmus test of the strength of extreme anti-Yeltsin forces, and it proved the existence of an ill-defined center that the president can try to win over.

As centerpiece of the meeting, Nikolai T. Ryabov, deputy chairman of the country’s standing legislature, the Supreme Soviet, delivered an anti-Yeltsin diatribe charging the president with having a vast appetite for power, political adventurism, seeking unconstitutional prerogatives and not consulting the legislature before plunging Russia into capitalist reforms that have reduced its economy to ruins.

First Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir F. Shumeiko, calling himself a frequent vodka-drinking buddy of Ryabov’s, responded that the speech was a tissue of “garbled facts and lies and what have you.”

The “scriptwriters,” Shumeiko told journalists, were trying to provoke Yeltsin into doing “something drastic”--apparently meaning a declaration of presidential rule or an attempt to dissolve the Congress itself.

But Yeltsin’s spokesman, Vyacheslav V. Kostikov, seemed to fuel such speculation, hinting darkly to reporters that “the Congress is pushing the president toward deep and tragic deliberations over what decision he must take to save reforms and democracy.”

By evening, a parliamentary panel had approved a bill submitted by Ryabov that would undo a compromise that Yeltsin and his chief foe, Ryabov’s boss and the Supreme Soviet chairman, Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, had cobbled together in December.

“This is an attempt to corner Yeltsin and turn him into a Queen of England,” sputtered an irate Yeltsin ally, Pyotr S. Filippov of the Radical Democratic Party.

Three months ago, when the Congress last met, the confrontation between the president and Parliament reached such a pitch that panicky lawmakers amended the constitution to greatly curb Yeltsin’s powers.

If Ryabov’s bill is passed, those amendments, subsequently suspended by the Yeltsin-Khasbulatov accord, will kick in immediately, and Yeltsin will lose the right to submit bills on the government’s behalf to the legislature. Control over key ministries will also swing to lawmakers, Yeltsin supporters in the Congress said.

“It will mean castration of presidential authority,” Filippov said.

Since the Congress, and legislatures throughout Russia, are largely dominated by former Communist Party members, Yeltsin spokesman Kostikov said the fate of Russia’s pro-market reform program--and even democracy--is now in danger.

Enacting Ryabov’s proposal would bring “restoration of the authority of the soviets (local governing councils) which will ultimately mean pro-Communist dictatorship,” Kostikov charged.

One Yeltsin foe, Oleg V. Kazarov, countered that in today’s world, “not a single president, with the exception maybe of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, has such power.”

By voting to end the December accord, the Parliament’s Drafting Commission also moved to strip Yeltsin of the authority to hold a referendum, scheduled for April 11. Yeltsin wants to seek voter support for transforming Russia into a “presidential republic” if he cannot wring a compromise from the Congress.

Leaders of Russia’s regions and semiautonomous ethnic homelands known as republics told the Congress that the plebiscite would dangerously encourage existing separatist tendencies. But some speakers were in favor of the vote, including the hard-line pro-Communist Russian Unity faction.

Daring Yeltsin to try for a massive showing of popular support at a time of great domestic troubles, the faction’s leaders are demanding that if he fails, he leave office immediately.

“When he lost a referendum, (French President Charles) de Gaulle resigned,” Russian Unity’s Mikhail G. Astafiev said.

Astafiev also moved to ask the Constitutional Court to rule on the “public refusal of the president to observe the constitution,” referring to Yeltsin’s remarks that with more than 300 amendments to the document, he no longer feels bound by it.

It was an overt invitation, as Astafiev himself put it, to take the “first step in the impeachment process.” It garnered only 418 “yes” votes against 341 “noes,” far short of a simple majority of the 1,033 deputies that Khasbulatov said are now active in the Congress.

Yet, earlier, Yeltsin suffered a setback when the Congress did not adopt his request to remove an agenda item permitting debate of the constitutionality of his acts as president, wording that some Yeltsin allies have said may elicit another attempt at impeachment.

Before it adjourned for the day, the Congress failed to muster enough votes to adopt Ryabov’s presidential power-cutting bill “as a basis for discussion,” the first step in turning it into the law of the land. So Yeltsin’s envoys, including presidential chief of staff Sergei A. Filatov, a former legislative official, marched off to parleys with the Drafting Commission to push the president’s own two-page proposal.

But the Itar-Tass news agency said the commission flatly rejected Yeltsin’s offer late in the evening, endorsing the Ryabov text instead.

Yeltsin’s envoys, whom the Congress had allowed to attend only as non-voting observers, left the room, calling the commission nothing but a “voting machine,” Itar-Tass reported.

Yeltsin is seeking to bring the Russian Central Bank under control of the executive branch, to force an end to the runaway printing of rubles that is undermining the administration’s economic reforms. But under his compromise offer, he now says it can simultaneously remain under legal “subordination” to the Supreme Soviet.

Yeltsin also dropped his insistence on holding the April 11 referendum if a power-sharing compromise is not worked out.