In Their No-Win Game, Yeltsin and His Foes in Congress Fold : Politics: Amid warnings of civil strife and dictatorship, the Russian archrivals back away from the abyss.

Russia’s leadership appeared to be stepping back from the brink of full-fledged political war Friday for the same reason that the superpowers avoided nuclear conflict: Neither side could win, and the results would be devastating.

With great gusto, both opponents and supporters of President Boris N. Yeltsin had drawn horrifying scenarios of impending civil strife and dictatorship all week.

The armed forces could split into two warring camps, they said, one supporting Yeltsin and the other backing his rivals in the Parliament. Russia could start to splinter and fall into the ferocious violence that has plagued its history.

But when it came right down to it, and the Congress of People’s Deputies convened Friday, all sides in Russia’s explosive power struggle seemed a little cowed--frightened enough by what they had wrought to make another try at compromise.

“The Congress is scared of itself,” Yeltsin’s spokesman, Vyacheslav V. Kostikov, exulted after the day’s parliamentary session ended with no serious move to oust the president. “They’re frightened by the possibility of impeachment.”

Yeltsin too backed off. He argued that “there is no point in pursuing conflict.” He made no mention of his earlier plans, apparently now abandoned, to rule the country temporarily by decree.

Battles are still expected at the Congress as Yeltsin and the deputies try to work out ways to prevent this kind of crisis from repeating itself. But already, Deputy Leonid Gurevich said, both the Congress and the president have “realized that neither side had enough strengthto win.”

For Yeltsin, that realization began right after he made his fateful television address Saturday night, announcing that he would institute “special rule” until a referendum on public confidence in him and on a new constitution could be held April 25.

Within hours, his vice president and the chairman of the Constitutional Court, Russia’s highest judicial body, followed him onto the airwaves and told the nation he was wrong.

Reports from Russia’s far-flung provinces indicated that they were split, with some supporting the president’s move and others vowing to defy it. Yeltsin thus could not be sure that the country would remain under control if he pursued his push for more power. He also ran into furious opposition from lawmakers, who managed to convene the Congress in record time, gathering deputies from across 11 time zones in just two days--no mean feat on the troubled Russian national airline, Aeroflot.

The Congress, technically Russia’s supreme government body, could be compared to a super-weapon. With its power to alter the constitution at will with a two-thirds vote, it could reduce Yeltsin to a figurehead president or impeach and remove him from office.

Then he would face a fateful decision: to submit, or to give up any pretense of lawfulness and resort to force, plunging the country into conflict. And even if he did try to bring the armed forces into play, their uneven obedience to the plotters’ orders during the 1991 coup attempt showed that they might not obey if they considered his cause unjust.

Even among some of his most loyal supporters, Yeltsin found chagrin at his apparent readiness to violate the constitution.

“The anti-constitutional road is the road to nowhere,” said Republican Party leader Vladimir Lysenko, long a powerful Yeltsin ally.

Yeltsin was outgunned. He stepped back Wednesday, issuing a decree to formalize his speech but leaving out its most controversial points, including rule by decree. On Friday, he said he was open to several compromise proposals.

Lawmakers too ran into the limits of their power.

As they prepared for Friday’s session of Congress, they could not help but see that by all indications, Yeltsin enjoyed far more support among the Russian masses than they did. Rumblings from the Cossacks in the Don River region and miners in western Siberia signaled that if deputies tried to dump Russia’s first-ever elected president, at least some of the population would not stand idly by.

One deputy noted with some dismay that since Yeltsin’s fateful speech, his approval rating appeared to have doubled among Russians, who tend to want order and strict rule above all else.

At the Congress itself, it became clear the opposition also simply did not have the votes to oust Yeltsin. The vast majority of deputies are deeply critical of Yeltsin’s excruciating reforms, but they balked.

“Their faces are frightened,” said Alexander Orfyonov, a Yeltsin spokesman. “They remind me of the coup in 1991, of the ‘Emergency Committee’ (of coup plotters) sitting up there. It’s not frightening to go against the president, but it’s frightening to go against the people.”

It was also terrifying to face the prospect of once again unleashing the merciless violence that has characterized much of Russian history. In the Soviet civil war between 1918 and 1920, which mainly pitted Communists against monarchists in the wake of the 1917 Revolution, hundreds of thousands of people died.

“I don’t think we can survive another revolution,” Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi told deputies.

In essence, said Andrei Makarov, a prominent lawyer and Yeltsin ally, Russian politicians were beginning to demonstrate that despite their wild rhetoric, they are sane people with no desire to destroy their country.

“These are normal people who understand what can happen in a country that’s stuffed with nuclear weapons,” he said.

It took a crisis this deep to bring home to Russia’s politicians that they must truly learn to compromise, commentator Alexander Tsypko said.

“Both sides have realized that there’s a limit to how far you can pump up the conflict,” Tsypko said. “I think for the first time, they looked into the abyss that awaits them.”