Yeltsin Begins Push for New Constitution : Russia: Flush with election victory, president lobbies for proposal giving him more power and abolishing Congress.

MOSCOW — Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin began trying to cash in Tuesday on his referendum victory, launching a sales campaign for a new constitution that would shore up his presidency and do away with the hostile Congress of People’s Deputies.

Yeltsin also showed a new willingness to ignore nationalist lawmakers when he issued a tough statement warning Bosnian Serbs that Russia will not stand by them if they continue to reject international peace plans.

Normally more circumspect because of the powerful support that Serbs, as brother Slavs, enjoy among Russian nationalists in the Parliament, Yeltsin made it clear that he is fed up with Serbian refusal to accept the peace plans.

“The Russian Federation will not protect those who resist the will of the world community,” he said in a statement.

Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev softened the statement slightly. But like Yeltsin, Kozyrev emphasized that “Russia will not patronize those who oppose the world community.”

All-but-final results of Sunday’s referendum, announced by Russia’s top election officials, showed that Yeltsin won the support of 58% of voters on the main question--whether they have confidence in him. A surprising 52.9% of voters, gritting their teeth at rampant inflation, said they also support his economic reforms.

But Yeltsin’s hopes for early elections to replace the antagonistic Congress were disappointed. Only 41.4% of registered voters backed early elections for deputies. That shortfall meant that Yeltsin must try somehow to persuade the current conservative Congress to pass the new constitution.

Sergei A. Filatov, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, said Tuesday that the new constitution would be Yeltsin’s top priority now, even though the referendum had not given him a legal way to push it through.

The proposed constitution would replace the patchwork of old Soviet-style laws and new amendments now in force, create a strong presidency, do away with the 1,068-seat Congress and leave Russia with a smaller, two-chamber legislature.

The constitution would become “the backbone of democratic Russia,” Sergei M. Shakhrai, Yeltsin’s top legal adviser, told a news conference called to begin touting the new charter to the public.

Already, however, signs of a coming struggle over the new constitution are growing.

The Parliament’s press center distributed a legal opinion that the presidency Yeltsin is proposing is too extreme, surpassing even the U.S. presidential system in that it would allow the chief executive to dissolve Parliament under certain conditions.

The charter “makes the president’s prerogatives much broader than those of the strongest presidents ever known to the civilized world,” the commentary by two legal experts said.

Shakhrai argued that Yeltsin’s showing at the referendum could be considered a popular mandate for the new constitution and said that the Russian president plans to ask the country’s regions, and then Parliament, for approval.

It remained unclear what Yeltsin would do if the Congress--as is expected--rejects his new constitution.

A top adviser, Mikhail Poltoranin, said ominously that “the president has been given a free hand by the people to act decisively.”

But Shakhrai and other advisers indicated that Yeltsin plans no unconstitutional maneuvers and that he might begin to lobby for a special constitutional convention that could include current lawmakers. The final document could then go up for a referendum.