Yeltsin’s Vice President Plans to Run Against Him

Professing to ignore “filth” slung at him by President Boris N. Yeltsin, Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi, an ally-turned-opponent, said Friday he will run for the Russian presidency against his estranged boss if given the chance.

On Thursday, Yeltsin told the nation he has completely lost trust in Rutskoi, a former fighter pilot who was his running mate in 1991.

On Friday, the gruff, mustachioed Rutskoi, 45, told reporters: “Time will show who is right--the president of Russia or myself. I was right 1 1/2 years ago when I spoke about the socially oriented economy and the stage-by-stage transition to a market. Now both the president and the head of government are speaking about this.”

A career officer who won the coveted gold star of a Hero of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Rutskoi had said last month he would become a presidential candidate if Yeltsin were beaten in the April 25 referendum. However, he said Friday that until recently, he had no plans to go head-on against Yeltsin.

“But after the president’s TV speech Thursday, and given the recent moves by the president and his team, I will not fail to join the campaign,” Rutskoi declared.

Yeltsin has said that choosing Rutskoi as his vice president was the biggest blunder he ever made. It was a calculated move aimed at boosting Yeltsin’s electoral chances with conservatives.

The square-shouldered, nattily tailored Rutskoi, who has unabashedly called himself a “chauvinist,” has now thrown in his lot with the enemies of Yeltsin’s free-market reforms.

Rutskoi, whose five-year term expires in 1996 along with Yeltsin’s, made it clear Friday that he does not intend to resign. And he said he no longer cares what the president says about him.

“I’ve gotten so accustomed to all this filth that nothing can touch me now,” Rutskoi said.

In another development Friday, political foes of Yeltsin who are members of the Supreme Soviet legislature’s commission charged with drafting a new constitution vigorously denounced Yeltsin’s draft constitutional text as a formula for one-man rule.

“(Yeltsin’s) constitution, if adopted, would plunge Russia into the Dark Ages of monarchy,” said Vladimir A. Bokov, a Communist on the panel.

Yeltsin, chairman of the commission, didn’t sanction Friday’s meeting and didn’t attend. His spokesman said any decisions it made in Yeltsin’s absence would be illegal and non-binding.

In effect, the commission, with Yeltsin’s archfoe Ruslan I. Khasbulatov in the chair, could barely muster a quorum. It spiked the president’s draft in a polite manner by agreeing to consider it only as raw material for amending the commission’s own text.

The author of that text, commission Secretary Oleg G. Rumyantsev who has also parted ways with Yeltsin, protested that the president’s text “puts the president above all branches of power, which is characteristic of authoritarian rule and far from democracy.”

In a resolution, the commission approved the Rumyantsev draft and sent it to Yeltsin, members of Parliament and Russia’s constituent republics for their consideration. Yeltsin has already submitted his draft to local leaders.

In the afternoon, thousands of Muscovites, Yeltsin included, attended the public viewing of the body of a 25-year-old riot policeman crushed to death during the May Day fracas on the streets of the Russian capital.

“The criminals will not escape punishment,” Yeltsin promised Vladimir Tolokneyev’s mother.

Yeltsin reassured Muscovites that police will be able to cope with anything that Communist and other hard-line demonstrators throw at them Sunday when Russia celebrates the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Sergei L. Loiko, a reporter in The Times’ Moscow bureau, contributed to this story.