Deputies Dash Hopes for Truce With Yeltsin

Russia’s conservative Congress of People’s Deputies on Saturday dashed the last hopes for a truce with President Boris N. Yeltsin by banning his proposed referendum on who should rule Russia and beginning steps to force the beleaguered reformer to run again for office.

Yeltsin, who has vowed to stave off attempts to cut his term short, gave no indication he would abandon attempts to put the nation’s political fate before the people.

Miners in the grimy Siberian Kuzbass coal region and Vorkuta in the far north telegraphed that they were ready to stage a general strike or take other measures to safeguard Yeltsin’s rule. In Moscow, a crowd of Yeltsin loyalists numbering no more than 2,000, chanting “Yeltsin, yes! Congress, no!,” assembled near the city hall for a march to Red Square.

Four days of vicious political warfare in the Kremlin left Russia’s leaders and institutions divided into irreconcilable camps, with a long period of an intense struggle for power looming before a tired, economically drained and increasingly apathetic country.

“We are at the start of a new Time of Troubles,” Parliament progressive Leonid B. Gurevich said, alluding to a period in the early 17th Century when Russia was torn by civil war, invasion and political confusion.

Before adjourning to the stirring strains of an air from a Glinka opera, the Congress entrusted Russia’s standing legislature with the attempt to take charge of the Itar-Tass news agency and Russian state television, now part of the executive branch that Yeltsin runs.

The legislature and its chairman, Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, the victor of the Congress session, were also empowered to try to bring about the ouster of two betes noires of Russia’s right wing, Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev, a pro-Westerner, and the boyish head of the privatization program, Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly B. Chubais.

Yeltsin had asked the Congress one final time by letter to grant his proposal for a nationwide referendum April 25 on founding a “presidential republic” in Russia and ending socialist-era restrictions on the buying and selling of land.

But by a 643-141 vote, the deputies chose to ban all nationwide referendums for the foreseeable future.

“The Congress does not ignore the will of the people but is seeking to protect them from political adventurism, from the chaos and tragedy of the disintegration of Russia,” deputies said in a message to the people.

Yeltsin, who stormed out of the Grand Kremlin Palace on Friday when the deputies voted to reduce his powers, stayed out of the public eye Saturday. He was studying the final Congress documents and was expected to go on nationwide television in the coming days, the Interfax news agency said.

Yeltsin, facing the gravest challenge to his leadership, does not intend to retreat from his plans to hold a nationwide vote, his chief of staff, Sergei A. Filatov, assured the Democratic Russia faction after the Congress decision.

Filatov said that to counter the Parliament’s ban on the referendum, rank-and-file citizens may now be called on to organize a non-binding “plebiscite,” paid for by voluntary contributions. Tens of millions of rubles have already been collected, he said.

That funding will be crucial, because the Congress vote contained an amendment that looked a lot like a ploy to swing Russia’s armed forces to the Parliament’s side. Deputies opted to use the $30 million in rubles already allocated to pay for a referendum the Congress had approved in December, but canceled by a new resolution Friday, to finance new housing for demobilized officers.

Money isn’t the only problem for Yeltsin. The resolution adopted Friday mandates automatic impeachment in the event he disbands the Parliament or tries to alter Russia’s state structure, and even Yeltsin backers admit that Russia’s constitution contains no word of a plebiscite.

If an unsanctioned election is attempted, “at that very moment Boris Yeltsin would cease to be president,” contended lawmaker Veniamin S. Sokolov.

In yet another blow to the 62-year-old Yeltsin, the Congress overwhelmingly voted to ask the smaller legislature chosen from its midst, the Supreme Soviet, to draw up a law on the early election of both the president and the Congress.

“The president is surrounded on all sides,” fumed Col. Gen. Dmitri A. Volkogonov, a close adviser.

Yeltsin, whose five-year term ordinarily would expire in 1996, has opposed simultaneous early elections with the Congress deputies, whose mandate runs out a year earlier.

But opposition Parliament members calculate that so many people are now fed up with inflation, crime, unemployment and the other byproducts of economic reform that the time to take on Yeltsin at the polls has arrived.

“With each month, support for us is growing--and melting away for the president,” predicted Mikhail G. Astafiev of the hard-line Russian Unity bloc.

But to force Yeltsin to go to the polls early would require amending the constitution, and thus a two-thirds majority in the Congress. Because some deputies in the moderate opposition are against early elections, anti-Yeltsin forces may not be able to muster the votes.

In its message to the people, the Congress claimed it had now righted the balance between branches of government by taking away extraordinary powers it had optimistically granted Yeltsin but that had delivered “no positive results” for Russians.

Refuting such logic, pro-Yeltsin lawmaker Viktor P. Mironov took the floor to proclaim that “the Congress has in effect achieved a Communist coup d’etat.”

Local leaders from Karelia, Arkhangelsk and elsewhere trooped to the podium to make clear they backed the Parliament’s leadership and not Yeltsin. They incarnate what is now one of Yeltsin’s biggest political problems: namely, that local governing councils across Russia were elected when the Soviet Communist Party still had a hammerlock on government.

First Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir F. Shumeiko said that if the legislative branch wins Russia’s power struggle, current reform strategy, already slowed considerably, will be supplanted by a “slow entry into the market, a soft credit policy, dragged-out privatization, continued state regulation of prices.”

In an acerbic closing speech, Khasbulatov said it was a “massive lie” that the Parliament’s mounting opposition to Yeltsin had delayed delivery of $24 billion in Western assistance allocated for Russia.

Former U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush “made a lot of promises to (Soviet President Mikhail S.) Gorbachev and (Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A.) Shevardnadze in exchange, first, for bringing about the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the Warsaw Treaty, then for bringing about the breakup of the Soviet Union,” Khasbulatov said. “But at the end of the day, the (U.S.) Congress did not release a single cent.”

On Saturday, President Clinton reiterated his support for Yeltsin.

“As far as I’m concerned he’s the only person who has been elected president of Russia,” he said. “I’m going to do what I can to be of support.”