Hostile Lawmakers Show No Respect, Keep Sniping at Yeltsin

Slapping at President Boris N. Yeltsin with a series of petty snubs, Russian lawmakers Wednesday fulfilled prophecies that Yeltsin’s referendum victory would do little to ease his chronic conflict with Parliament.

In its most hostile actions, the Supreme Soviet, Russia’s standing legislature, pronounced the government’s progress on selling off state property “unsatisfactory” and disbanded a committee on economic reform that was headed by a Yeltsin ally.

The chief of Russia’s privatization program, Anatoly B. Chubais, snapped back that “Parliament has completely cut itself off from its electors,” the RIA news agency reported. “It’s clear that legally and politically . . . the deputies represent no one but themselves.”

In Sunday’s referendum, 58% of those who voted backed Yeltsin and 53% supported his program of market-oriented economic reforms. But less than 50% of the entire electorate voted for early parliamentary elections, leaving Yeltsin to grapple until 1995 with the same conservative lawmakers who prompted him to call the referendum in the first place.

As if going out of their way to show Yeltsin that they plan to give him no more respect than before, lawmakers Wednesday overrode the president’s objections and voted to create their own parliamentary security service.

They also decided to form a special panel to look into Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi’s allegations of widespread corruption in the Yeltsin administration.

Yeltsin’s aides have vehemently denied Rutskoi’s allegations.

Parliament Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, Yeltsin’s political archfoe, added a personal attack by commenting publicly that he believes the Russian president has concluded a secret deal with President Clinton on the Yugoslav crisis. He referred to “numerous reports” that Yeltsin would agree to Serbian sanctions--but only after he made it through the referendum.

Yeltsin, meanwhile, continued his own offensive. He stripped Rutskoi of his last substantive job, overseeing a special panel on fighting organized crime, in continued punishment for Rutskoi’s decision to side with Parliament against Yeltsin.

Rutskoi “is now hanging in a political vacuum,” presidential spokesman Vyacheslav V. Kostikov said. Yeltsin had already taken away Rutskoi’s other main job, overseeing Russia’s agriculture, last week after Rutskoi openly turned against him.

Yeltsin “has appointed himself czar,” Rutskoi griped to the Interfax news agency.

The Russian president gathered his council of special advisers to work out the post-referendum strategy that aides say must now concentrate on pushing through a new Russian constitution.