Bid to Oust Yeltsin Fizzles in Congress : Russia: Lawmakers concede they don’t have enough votes for impeachment. Pressure is off, but formal vote is still expected. Compromise plan backs early elections.

After a week of searing political tension that focused a nervous world’s gaze on Moscow, the right-wing drive to oust Boris N. Yeltsin fizzled in Parliament on Friday, and Russia’s president and the head of its highest court both said citizens need to have the final say.

“It is too early to declare victory, but it is already time to say that the idea of impeachment is dead,” Sergei B. Stankevich, a Yeltsin adviser, said as the first day of the Congress of People’s Deputies drew to an end.

Even die-hard Yeltsin opponents admitted that they could not muster the needed two-thirds majority, 689 votes, as the 1,033-member Parliament assembled in great suspense for its emergency session inside the Kremlin. At the most, anti-Yeltsin deputies forecast after doing some head-counting, they had 600 votes.

So Yeltsin opponents from the Russian Unity bloc endorsed Constitutional Court Chairman Valery D. Zorkin’s unexpected compromise proposal for early presidential and Parliament elections this autumn, a contest that they think Yeltsin will lose.

No formal deal was cut by the end of the day, however. Renewed attacks on Russia’s first president, and probably a formal vote attempting to oust him, can be expected when Parliament reconvenes this morning.

But the pressure on Yeltsin seemed to be off for the first time in a week. The Russian Foreign Ministry said that, as planned, Yeltsin will attend the April 3-4 summit in Vancouver, Canada, with President Clinton.

Returning to the chamber that he had stormed out of two weeks earlier, vowing never to come back, Yeltsin again insisted to the Congress that he has the right as president to hold a referendum to prove that he still has public support for himself and for a new constitution he favors that would give Russia a presidential system of government.

“I have made my choice by entrusting my fate to the fairest judge, the people,” Yeltsin said from the Congress rostrum.

It was the 62-year-old head of state’s stubborn insistence on holding the April 25 vote and his announcement last Saturday that he was proclaiming “special rule” that accelerated the gravest political crisis here since the August, 1991, putsch--one some Russians said could spark civil war.

Yeltsin had made it clear that he would ignore any vote to remove him from office. Second thoughts about the consequences were what made some advocates of ousting Yeltsin recoil when the time to act arrived in the Congress.

“If impeachment is announced, the country will split, the power structures will split,” said Viktor V. Aksyuchits, a leading opponent. “At the same time, I believe he earned impeachment long ago.”

Yeltsin ally Dimitri A. Volkogonov reminded deputies that the political warfare could ultimately drag in the Russian army and its state-of-the-art weaponry, “causing a national tragedy in a nuclear country.”

In an interview with the Interfax news agency at the close of the session, Yeltsin’s chief tormentor, Parliament Speaker Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, said he too would not vote for Yeltsin’s removal from office. Since the wily Khasbulatov manipulates the chamber like a virtuoso, the issue may now never even reach a vote.

The first day of the Congress was no love feast, however. While police carefully separated the several thousand pro- and anti-Yeltsin demonstrators outside the Kremlin walls, inside, the president was pilloried by many speakers who trooped to the rostrum in the barrel-vaulted hall. Some demanded that the Parliament move to oust him from office.

“His policies for a year have deprived us of the status of a great power,” Boris V. Tarasov of the conservative Fatherland faction said bitterly. The START II arms cuts signed by Yeltsin, he said, are “close to betraying the state.”

Yeltsin’s own vice president, Alexander V. Rutskoi, for months a steady critic of his boss’s policies, declared in a fiery speech that the Russian people “oppose the way the reforms are pursued when change is not in the interests of the majority but in the interests of a minority, which is brazenly plundering the people, pilfering the military and the country until it has been reduced to a state of bankruptcy--incapable of providing for its own citizens, cadging more and more credit and incapable even of paying interest on old debts.”

To dissipate hostility to his economic program, Yeltsin vowed a “new course” that will include a “strong social element” to remove some of the sting of the painful transition to capitalism. One component is an increase in the minimum wage next month.

This will not be backtracking on the fundamentals of reform, Yeltsin was quick to add. “We must only take realistic steps,” he said.

In a bid to broaden his government’s power base, Yeltsin, who removed a trio of ministers from their posts on the eve of the Congress, said he is ready to examine candidacies for government jobs from all “responsible political forces.”

Zorkin, who on Sunday accused Yeltsin of trying to stage a coup d’etat , was conciliatory in his speech. Ilya Konstantinov of the hard-line National Salvation Front said the judge seemed to have concluded that the battle for power in Russia, in which he had sided with Khasbulatov, might end with Yeltsin trying to call in the army.

Zorkin proposed a 10-point plan that included simultaneous early elections for the president and Parliament this autumn, abolishing the Congress and establishing a two-house legislature as the supreme lawmaking body.

Zorkin’s plan made no mention of Yeltsin’s referendum, and that omission would make it automatically unacceptable to the president.

Members of Yeltsin’s entourage said he liked some elements of Zorkin’s proposal, but presidential Chief of Staff Sergei A. Filatov said, “The main thing is to have a vote on April 25. The rest is secondary.”

Conscious of the distance separating the two proposals, a parliamentary commission worked into the night to try to package a deal. According to one report, the commission agreed by evening to hold the referendum and ask three questions of the voters: whether they trust the president, whether they want early elections for both the president and Parliament, and whether they approve of the conduct of economic reform.

Early elections are considered necessary by leaders of many factions to end the stalemate over power between Yeltsin and his enemies that has paralyzed Russian government since last fall. One draft studied by the commission would call early elections on Oct. 10.

It also calls for Yeltsin to fire trusted members of his entourage, such as Deputy Prime Minister Sergei M. Shakhrai and Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev, evidently because they are suspected of masterminding the proclamation of “special rule.”

Yeltsin’s announcement last Saturday that he was assuming extraordinary powers brought the ruling from Zorkin’s court that he had violated Russia’s Soviet-era constitution. The ruling was a necessary step in the impeachment process and caused Khasbulatov to summon deputies back to Moscow for the emergency meeting.

Backing down in the face of opposition from both the Parliament and court, Yeltsin then deleted mention of extraordinary powers from the official text when he published his decree.

Despite Yeltsin’s professed readiness to embrace government candidates from many factions, “the formation of a coalition government is out of the question at present,” First Deputy Prime Minister Vladmir F. Shumeiko cautioned journalists. As for the most recent government changes, they were planned earlier, he asserted.

In decrees dated Thursday, Yeltsin removed Economics Minister Andrei A. Nechayev, Finance Minister Vasily V. Barchuk and Deputy Prime Minister Boris G. Saltykov. But the three men hardly left in disgrace.

Deputy Prime Minister Alexander N. Shokhin said Barchuk had asked to be transferred long ago because of health problems, and that he was named ambassador to Norway. Nechayev, linked by right-wing lawmakers to the “shock therapy” economic policies that they abhor, will work at the new Russian Finance Corp., which is to help private enterprises obtain credits. Saltykov will now devote himself to his other government job as minister of science and technology policy.

Deputy Prime Minister Boris G. Fyodorov, who has overall responsibility for Russia’s economics policy, will assume the finance ministry job as well. No replacement was announced for Nechayev.