Top Russian Court Rules Yeltsin Act Unconstitutional : Politics: But jurists reportedly stop short of calling for president’s impeachment in wake of his power grab. Sources say three members voted against the decision.

Russia’s highest court ruled today that President Boris N. Yeltsin’s claim of extraordinary powers is unconstitutional, but it reportedly stopped short of calling for his impeachment.

The Constitutional Court reached its decision after an all-night session but did not announce it immediately. The court spokeswoman, Anna Malysheva, said the ruling still lacked the signatures of all the judges.

Court sources said three judges voted against the decision.

The sources said the decision concluded that Yeltsin had violated the constitutional principle of division of powers by declaring Saturday night that he would ignore lawmakers and run the country by decree to force a popular vote of confidence on his rule, a new constitution and a new Parliament.

Russia’s Interfax news agency reported that an initial draft of the decision saying that Yeltsin’s violation constituted grounds for his impeachment was deleted from the ruling, apparently to give the president and his legislative opponents room to compromise.

“My understanding of what the court is trying to do is to give both parties in this dispute a way to compromise,” Bakhtiyar Tuzmukhamedov, head of the court’s international law division, told the Associated Press.

The Supreme Soviet legislature asked the court Sunday to rule on Yeltsin’s actions as a first step toward his possible impeachment by the larger Congress of People’s Deputies.

As the court gathered Monday, Yeltsin’s aides moved to discredit Court Chairman Valery D. Zorkin, who within minutes of Yeltsin’s announcement had branded it “an attempted coup d’etat.” Presidential spokesman Vyacheslav V. Kostikov said Zorkin’s “hurried and biased position was contrary to legal ethics . . . casting doubts upon his impartiality.”

Speaking to thousands of cheering Yeltsin supporters Monday in a downtown Moscow movie theater, First Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir F. Shumeiko said the president will resist an impeachment move and go ahead with the planned April 25 referendum, inviting foreign observers to witness its legitimacy.

“Unfortunately, the Constitutional Court has gone into politics,” he told the rally.

“Down with Zorkin!” the crowd shouted back, filling the theater with a name unfamiliar to most Muscovites until recently, when he stepped into the middle of a Titanic struggle for the leadership of post-Communist Russia.

“That’s a very good slogan, but the president has to stay within the framework of the law,” Shumeiko replied. “It might not be the law of the Constitutional Court but of the international public. . . . We may invite (observers) to confirm that we have not deviated from the law at all. We will do that!”

Yeltsin had been expected at the rally but didn’t show up. He has not been seen in public since his bombshell announcement in a prerecorded television appearance Saturday night, the day before his 84-year-old mother died of heart failure. Aides said they worried about how he is holding up.

Yeltsin, 62, struggling to lead Russia toward democracy and a market economy after seven decades of communism, has been resisted at every turn by conservative and Communist lawmakers elected under Soviet rule. His referendum is aimed at winning popular support for a “presidential republic” and forcing the Congress of People’s Deputies to face reelection to a new Parliament with diminished powers.

It was the Congress’ vote 10 days ago to block the referendum that spurred Yeltsin to assume temporary “special powers” and threw Russia into its deepest political crisis since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Yeltsin’s move has shaken his government. His vice president, national security adviser and chief prosecutor have condemned it as unconstitutional.

Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin and his Cabinet, including the “power ministers” of defense, security and interior, have taken a neutral stand on the legality of Yeltsin’s action, pledging only to support “the efforts of the democratically elected president to prevent anarchy, chaos (and) political confrontation.”

Justice Minister Nikolai Fyodorov, who refused even to sign that statement, resigned Monday, dealing a further blow to Yeltsin’s effort to portray his action as within the law.

The constitution, drafted under Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev, has been amended 320 times since Yeltsin took office nearly two years ago. Many of its provisions are contradictory. As in the United States, for example, the constitution provides for “separation of powers” among the executive, legislative and judicial branches, but in Soviet tradition declares the Congress to be the supreme power of the land.

Yeltsin’s claim to the court, laid out in the hearing by his chief of staff, is that Congress had violated the separation of powers principle by repeatedly blocking his executive orders.

The Russian leader has won support from President Clinton and the leaders of other Western nations that underwrite his reforms with billions of dollars in aid. They have overlooked the cloudy legality of Yeltsin’s action while stressing his championship of reform and his pledge to respect human rights at home and keep peace with the West.

“The unanimous support by the world public, governments and the political leaders of contemporary rule-of-law states for Boris Yeltsin’s proposals for pulling out of the constitutional crisis is further proof of the legal validity of the president’s actions,” Yeltsin spokesman Kostikov said Monday.

Zorkin on Monday insisted that the constitution offers the president enough powers and must be obeyed.

“Whoever may be calling for actions that diverge from the constitution, even allowing for this or that interpretation of the president himself, dooms Russia to catastrophe,” he declared.

The judge denied that his reaction to Yeltsin’s statement had prejudiced him. He said he was judging the president’s words, not the decree in which Yeltsin assumed temporary special powers.

But he admitted that the issue at hand, whether the decree is unconstitutional, was complicated because the decree itself had not been published or submitted to the court.

Yeltsin’s aides offered two explanations for that. Sergei A. Filatov, his chief of staff, said the president took the decree to his rural dacha Saturday, then was distracted by his mother’s death. He said the decree will be published today and expressed surprise that the court had begun the hearing without it.

Another aide, Mikhail Poltoranin, said Yeltsin withheld the decree after Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi turned against him. The aide said Yeltsin was weighing whether to put Rutskoi up for a separate vote of confidence in the April 25 referendum.

Other politicians said Yeltsin may not have signed the decree at all but rather floated it as a trial balloon to test reaction, identify his enemies and compromise if necessary. An unsigned decree, they argued, cannot be declared unconstitutional.

Rutskoi, an air force general who is Yeltsin’s constitutional successor, has carefully avoided personal criticism of the president for his action. In a statement Monday, he accused free-market advisers of pushing Yeltsin to extremes “to conceal and camouflage the grave mistakes they have made in running the country, which have produced many material losses and human sacrifices.”

“The people from the president’s inner circle who were recently referred to as a reform government . . . didn’t have any clear plan oriented to Russia’s own potential, only to their own ambitions and mythical aid from the West,” Rutskoi said.

Damaged by legislative opposition and defections from the government, Yeltsin still commands a small but vociferous democratic movement as well as a state-owned media network of two television stations, the national radio and Itar-Tass news agency.

On Monday, his office announced a decree ordering the Interior Ministry to protect state-owned media from any attempt by the legislature to take them over. A bill to do just that is before the Supreme Soviet. The decree also would guarantee press freedom.

The High Court vs. Yeltsin

Here is a profile of the Constitutional Court, Russia’s highest tribunal, which held a hearing on whether President Boris N. Yeltsin overstepped his constitutional authority by declaring special powers to rule by decree.

HISTORY: The Supreme Soviet, or legislature, set up the court to head an independent judicial branch in October, 1991, two months before the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia became independent.

WHO: The court has 13 judges, elected for life by the Supreme Soviet. All are legal experts and academics, and eight, including Chairman Valery D. Zorkin, are former Communist Party members. Zorkin, 50, was elected chairman by the judges. A former law professor who entered politics in 1990, he was working on a Supreme Soviet commission drafting a new constitution before being elected to the new court.

PAY: About $120 a month, equal to Yeltsin’s.

RULINGS: The court’s most controversial ruling upheld Yeltsin’s right to divest the Communist Party of state assets but not his ban on its political activity. The court has overruled several other decisions by Yeltsin and at least two by the legislature.