Russian Lawmakers Move to Oust Yeltsin : Scene: In Moscow, there’s a feeling of a topsy-turvy deja vu of the coup days of 1991. But this time around, many of Yeltsin’s defenders have become his accusers.

Alexander Sakharov, unshaven and scarred by an injury that has left one eye a blank white, stood Sunday on a muddy rise by the Russian White House as a human rebuke to President Boris N. Yeltsin.

“Defenders of the White House Against the President-Usurper,” read his placard, so shocking that passersby approached him to ask if it was a mistake.

It was not. During the coup attempt of August, 1991, Sakharov had come to the towering white government building on the Moskva River to defend Yeltsin against the hard-line junta that had seized power.

On Sunday, the White House environs bore an uncanny resemblance to the three-day, pro-Yeltsin vigil in 1991, from the smoky fragrance of bonfires to the snatches of song. But the flags were Communist red this time, and Sakharov had come to try to help bring Yeltsin down.

“Beneath the mask of a democrat, Yeltsin turned out to be a typical Bolshevik bureaucrat who can only use authoritarian measures,” the 64-year-old radio engineer said bitterly of Yeltsin’s announcement Saturday that he is imposing temporary rule by decree.

Across the road from Sakharov and about 3,000 other anti-Yeltsin protesters, a nearly equal crowd of the president’s backers waved red-white-and-blue Russian flags and chanted slogans in his support.

The dueling demonstrations reflected a deepening political split across Russia, extending from hotheaded activists to the vast majority of Russians going about their normal weekend business.

“I think we must support only the president, because he moves forward and not backward,” schoolteacher Anna Logunova said, stopping amid a small knot of debaters on Pushkin Square, Moscow’s equivalent of Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park.

“All he cares about is power,” another woman interrupted. “He doesn’t care about the economy, laws or anything else. He’s an idiot.”

Yeltsin has staked his political survival on the hope that enough Russian voters still believe in him to grant him a majority in a nationwide referendum he has proposed for April 25. The referendum is expected to ask voters whether they back him over his political nemesis, the conservative Congress of People’s Deputies.

Judging by Sunday’s rallies and extensive street interviews, Russians were unfazed by Yeltsin’s imposition of “special rule.” But they also had only pathetic scraps left of the popular love that gave him nearly 90% of the vote in his first election race in 1989.

Printer Vladimir Alexandrov, waiting to get into an American war movie at the Rossiya Cinema, was not concerned at all that Yeltsin’s move appeared to violate the Russian constitution.

“We’ve always had strict laws in Russia, but what’s saved us is that their enforcement was never tight,” he said. “Nothing scary has happened. On a global scale, in the civilized world, yes, the constitution has been violated. But with our national traditions, this is practically normal.”

Alexandrov’s brother, Alexander, added that the current constitution, a messy patchwork still based on a Soviet-era version, was not worth defending, anyway.

But neither of the two solid, brown-haired brothers had much good to say about Yeltsin, either.

“I don’t like him personally,” Alexander said. “But at the moment, there’s no better figure.”

The most powerful argument put forth by Yeltsinites, at rallies and in eruptions of vehement debate on Pushkin Square, was that the Congress of People’s Deputies is a conglomeration of former apparatchiks trying to doom Russia to a continuation of Communist rule.

“The most important thing now is for Russia to create private property,” factory worker Viktor Kazarinov said. “And the Congress, which was elected from the old Soviet bosses, sees its main task as not letting people become property owners.”

He and other Yeltsin supporters contended that for Russia’s reforms to move ahead, the country must keep the current president at its helm.

Other voices, however, lamented the excruciating economic pinch that Yeltsin, who came to power promising that the people would not suffer under his leadership, has brought.

Ludmila Pugacheva calculated that she now earns 8,000 rubles a month and that to buy two pounds of meat and sausage costs her more than 1,000 rubles. Before Yeltsin freed prices in late 1991, she was earning 250 rubles, but her meat supply cost a total of only four rubles.

“He deceived me,” said the blue-eyed railway worker and mother of two.

Several signs at the White House bespoke an even less forgiving mood than Pugacheva’s, with one declaring, “Drunken Pig, Get Out of the Kremlin!”

Some scuffles broke out in the milling crowd, and an ABC-TV camera crew was reportedly beaten in a melee.

Overall, however, Moscow enjoyed a calm Sunday blessed by an occasional patch of early spring sunshine, belying dire predictions by Yeltsin’s rivals that his decree would lead to civil war.

Sunday protests have become almost a Moscow tradition. The debate at Pushkin Square may have run a few degrees hotter than usual, but there was little of the tension and dread that accompanied the 1991 coup.

“I don’t feel any electric charge in the atmosphere,” Vladimir Alexandrov said. “It’s pretty quiet. They started perestroika at the top and it’s continuing at the top. Down here, all is quiet.”