Yeltsin Dealt New Setbacks in Battle to Keep Authority

President Boris N. Yeltsin, his authority at its lowest ebb, was assailed Thursday by Russia’s Parliament chief and abandoned by the nation’s top judge as his allies warned that a law awaiting final approval today could prove fatal to Russian reforms.

The Congress of People’s Deputies voted 672-116 in principle for a law to restrict presidential powers, in effect resolving the tug of war between Yeltsin and the legislature squarely in favor of the latter and its chief, Ruslan I. Khasbulatov. The law includes points that Yeltsin’s spokesman said are totally unacceptable.

“Some clauses destroy everything,” Vyacheslav V. Kostikov, the spokesman, said of the prospect of continuing the reforms to move Russia to a market economy from one that is centrally directed.

“If they adopt this resolution tomorrow, it’s the beginning of the end,” pro-Yeltsin Deputy Leonid B. Gurevich of Murmansk predicted glumly.

Others were far less apocalyptic, noting that although Yeltsin’s foes showed they have enough votes to amputate his powers, he had bargained to win greater executive-branch control over fiscal and budgetary policy.

“For the government, anything that will allow it to work more calmly is acceptable,” Economics Minister Andrei A. Nechayev said.

But in an unmistakable sign of the president’s waning authority, the head of the third branch of the government, Constitutional Court Chairman Valery D. Zorkin, sided with the Congress on Thursday.

As debate in the 1,033-member Congress rolled on in a cream-toned hall of the Kremlin, Kostikov dropped a hint that Yeltsin could call out the police or the army to enforce presidential rule if the Congress persists and cuts back his powers.

“I would like to draw your attention to a small detail you may have missed. When the president entered the meeting hall today, first of all he greeted (Defense Minister Pavel S.) Grachev, (Security Minister Viktor P.) Barannikov and (Interior Minister Victor F.) Yerin,” Kostikov said.

And in Washington, there were reports from U.S. officials that Yeltsin has warned world leaders that he may dissolve the Congress and assume emergency powers as a last resort. The U.S. officials said Yeltsin had passed on his warning through German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who had written to President Clinton and other world leaders.

In a stern 20-minute address to deputies in which his appeals for compromise proved to be in vain, Yeltsin said Russia “needs a president in these hard times more than ever before. Only a president chosen by the people can implement tough but necessary measures.

“The Congress must choose between cooperation and confrontation. It’s either/or,” he said.

But the Congress, a Soviet-era creation largely hostile to his radical recipes for the country’s transformation to a market system, voted for cutting back his powers anyway.

Chances for the 62-year-old president to alter their eight-point resolution today seem scant indeed, given the patent triumph of an anti-Yeltsin coalition that combined Khasbulatov and other members of the Parliament’s Presidium, opposition moderates, Communists and anti-Western xenophobes.

“We have no foreign policy, no domestic policy,” Khasbulatov railed during his turn at the podium, in what may have been the most emotional anti-Yeltsin speech of his career.

He demanded that Russia’s privatization czar, Anatoly B. Chubais, be fired immediately. Rebuking Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, who spoke up to defend “strong presidential power,” Khasbulatov threatened to cut off salaries to government workers.

Attacking the man most closely identified with Yeltsin’s policies abroad, Khasbulatov claimed that the president had promised “countless times” to fire pro-Western Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev.

“One should match one’s deeds with words,” Khasbulatov taunted Yeltsin, who sat unsmiling at a desk behind him and left the hall only when a deputy demanded he be impeached.

Calling the collapsed truce that he reached with Yeltsin in December “the devil’s work,” Khasbulatov, who was largely noncommittal when the Congress began Wednesday, demanded that deputies cancel that deal. In their vote approving the draft law in principle, they agreed to do so.

If the deputies repeat that vote when time comes to adopt a definitive text, Yeltsin would also lose the nationwide referendum, now scheduled for April 11, that he wanted both as a first step toward creating a U.S.-style presidency and as a recourse if the Congress refuses to give him what he wants.

Constitutional amendments passed at the last Congress in December would also go into force that would sap Yeltsin’s powers in relation to the legislature’s, including granting it the right to annul his decrees.

If Yeltsin were to try to disband Parliament, a step that hard-line deputies charge he is planning under what he has darkly referred to as the “final variation,” another reactivated amendment would bring about his automatic impeachment.

In December, Yeltsin brought in the Constitutional Court’s Zorkin to broker his accord with Khasbulatov. But on Thursday, Zorkin abandoned him to side with the Congress.

“Contempt of the law has become widespread even among top officials of the Russian Federation and its subjects,” Zorkin said in a speech that he might well have used to defend the December agreement, which Yeltsin wants to preserve.

In lunchtime negotiating sessions attended by Khasbulatov and Chernomyrdin, Yeltsin managed to amend the original draft resolution to allow the heads of the Central Bank, State Statistics Committee, State Property Fund and other key economic agencies to sit on Chernomyrdin’s Council of Ministers, or Cabinet, while remaining subordinated to Parliament.

The Russian budget, which now can be drawn up without input from Chernomyrdin’s ministries, would henceforth have to take account of their views.

“The project as it stands at least gives us the possibility to continue the reforms,” said Radical Democratic leader Pyotr S. Filippov, a Yeltsin supporter, as he tried to put the best face on the day’s developments. “The president keeps power in the government. The government, moreover, gets what it needs--that is, the possibility to get control of the Property Fund and, the most important question, of the Central Bank.”

But in a country that keenly watches the rise and fall of leaders, citizens will probably be struck first by Yeltsin’s obvious lack of clout in his failure to obtain the deal he wanted, whatever the ramifications for economic policy.

“To be honest, his position is desperate, because he is strictly limited now in his options,” said Galina V. Starovoitova, a former Yeltsin adviser.

So what might the Russian president do if the Congress gives final approval to a law he rejects?

After the Supreme Soviet, the country’s working legislature, failed to prepare for the April referendum, Yeltsin supporters said he might go ahead anyway with a non-binding plebiscite to prove the breadth of his popular support.

“Yeltsin’s power is in the people. Nobody can stop Yeltsin or the democrats from getting down to the people,” Kozyrev said in a CNN interview after the Congress had adjourned for the day.

CLINTON SUPPORT: The President says he will back embattled Yeltsin. A10