NEWS ANALYSIS : Yeltsin’s Gamble Puts Him on Shaky Ground

On Aug. 19, 1991, his finest hour, a stouthearted Boris N. Yeltsin clambered atop a tank and urged Russians to rally around him to save the constitution and democratic reform.

Saturday, with a stroke of his presidential pen, a desperate Yeltsin, making what seemed his political last stand, countermanded key clauses of the same constitution--and assured Russians he was acting for the same cause.

“The last barriers to the total power of the Congress, soviets and (Supreme Soviet) are down,” the beleaguered Russian leader, justifying his drastic actions, said in a televised address.

“Nothing can stop them, no one can hold them back from lawless despotism,” Yeltsin warned.

By announcing that he was assuming extraordinary powers so a national referendum can go forward April 25 despite an explicit veto from the Congress of People’s Deputies, Yeltsin is trying to reframe the main issue confronting the country today as legitimacy, and not simple legality.

He wants the nearly 150 million people of Russia to be asked if, yet again, they are ready to rally around Yeltsin and abolish the conservative-dominated Congress that he asserts is bent on restoring Soviet tyranny.

But in what may be the worst possible scenario for the Siberian who became Russia’s first democratically elected leader less than two years ago, the issue as he formulates it almost certainly will never go to a full-fledged vote.

Entire ethnic enclaves like Tatarstan and Yakutia--the latter alone as large as India--have already served notice they will not participate. Elected leaders in regions of Russia itself have also opted out.

Countless citizens, now hard-pressed to make ends meet in the brutal environment of Wild West capitalism that has taken root under Yeltsin, have lost all interest in politics and wouldn’t vote if given the chance.

For a sizable minority, the restoration of a Communist past brandished like a scarecrow by Yeltsin now seems like a blissful alternative. Others think today’s denizen of the Kremlin covets the powers of a czar and has betrayed democratic voters.

And, as a sort of booby trap to further undermine Yeltsin’s waning legitimacy, before recessing one week ago, the Congress acted to set the wheels of the impeachment process turning if Yeltsin tried to unilaterally call a referendum, as he now has.

Early reviews of Yeltsin’s Saturday evening gamble showed his position to be precarious indeed, with his own vice president, Alexander V. Rutskoi, objecting publicly that the declaration of “special rule” violates no fewer than 18 articles of the constitution, and calling for criminal charges against Yeltsin advisers who counseled such a step.

The head of Russia’s Constitutional Court, Valery D. Zorkin, who has swung his support in recent weeks to the legislature, said the constitution had been gutted.

“In fact, what we are faced with now is the attempt to carry out a coup,” Zorkin said in a television interview, implying that the tables had turned completely from August, 1991, with Yeltsin now in the role of the usurper of power.

In his address, Yeltsin pugnaciously contended that he had reasserted his “vertical chain of command” over the entire executive branch, but although he had a week to plot his course of action, he still couldn’t produce an organized show of government support.

Even his prime minister, Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, was conspicuously silent Saturday night.

Yeltsin is justifying his course of action with a legalistic argument--the cancellation this month by the Congress of a referendum it had already approved, an act not envisioned by Russia’s constitution. But his reaction seemed largely a result of desperation over the whittled-down powers left him by the same Congress session.

The victory of Ruslan I. Khasbulatov and the remainder of the leadership of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s smaller standing legislature, in the Parliament session is “a road straight to chaos and the death of Russia,” Yeltsin warned.

Yeltsin assured his fellow citizens that he is acting precisely to secure the very basis of Russia’s constitution--the principle of “people’s power.” But even knee-jerk supporters said there was little doubt that what he did was, on its face, illegal.

“Instead of watching the country slide back to a Communist dictatorship, the president has chosen the route of a ‘constitutional riot,’ ” Radical Democratic leader Anatoly Y. Shabad said. “But he is leaving the last word to the people.”

In his televised speech, a determined but haggard-looking Yeltsin made a point of saying that he had ordered the Defense Ministry to stay out of the political process and assured Russians that the power struggle could be settled “without tanks or barricades.”

Military officers during the most recent session of the Congress seemed to strike the pose of neutral observers when asked about the Yeltsin-Khasbulatov conflict. But the position of Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev and other members of the top brass now that Yeltsin has made his move is yet to be known.

At the heart of the conflict is Russia’s 1977 constitution, much amended since. The document, a statement of lofty but seldom-observed socialist intentions during the stagnation years of Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev, was altered under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to provide for a new super Parliament, the Congress, as the supreme institution of government.

The first and current Congress was elected in March, 1990, when communism was still the official creed and the Soviet Communist Party the only one allowed by law. When a Russian presidency was later created and Yeltsin was elected to fill it in June, 1991, the constitutional supremacy of the Congress remained untouched--an oversight the Yeltsin entourage now rues.

At this month’s Congress session that saw an all-out onslaught on Yeltsin’s powers by reactionaries and moderates also alarmed at Russia’s continuing economic slide, deputies spoke much of their reverence for a constitution they have amended at least 320 times. Yeltsin dismissed such talk Saturday as a smoke screen.