NORTHRIDGE : Yeltsin Defender to Miss Key Russian Vote

Arkady Tcherkasov hurled vodka bottles filled with gasoline to protect Boris Yeltsin at the barricades during the 1991 Soviet coup.

Now, thanks to an ill-timed lecture tour and an airline ticket he can’t change, he will be in Northridge during what may be the most important turning point in his hero’s career--the April 25 referendum on Yeltsin’s authority.

Tcherkasov, who is scheduled to lecture at Cal State Northridge today, arrived in California last weekend from Canada, where he was lecturing when the referendum date was set. Since he arrived in Northridge, he said he’s been frantically trying to figure out how to get an absentee ballot--something still unfamiliar in Russian democracy.

Tcherkasov, a senior research fellow with the Academy of Sciences of Russia’s Institute of United States and Canada Studies, said he feels pessimistic about Yeltsin’s chances on Sunday, and laughingly added that there’s a trace of superstition in his desire to cast the one vote that might help him win: “Yeltsin has always won when I have voted for him,” he said.

For years, Tcherkasov said, he labored quietly in daylight as an arctic researcher, and at night, secretly circulated anti-communist literature, he said. When he heard the news of the attempted Soviet coup while shaving one morning in 1991, he sent his wife and daughter out of town, “took two bottles of vodka and something to eat, and went to the barricades,” he said.

His voice rises excitedly when he talks of the three nights he spent there, warding off army tanks: “Myself, a university professor--to stand on a barricade with a Molotov cocktail and be shot at!” he said. “Now it’s easy to talk about. But then, in the darkness, with the shouting, the fire. . . . It was a desperate feeling.”

Tcherkasov’s lecture on “Russia’s Dilemma” is 2 p.m. in the West Valley Room of the CSUN Student Union Building.