In Barricaded Russia Parliament, a Dramatic Plea : Crisis: The nation’s top judge exhorts lawmakers to accept a compromise. Riot police are ranged outside.

In a barricaded Parliament building surrounded by riot police, Russia’s top judge pleaded with lawmakers Friday to accept a compromise plan for early elections and end their dangerous standoff with President Boris N. Yeltsin.

“I do not want to discuss here who is right and who is wrong,” Constitutional Court Chairman Valery D. Zorkin told nearly 500 lawmakers defying Yeltsin’s decree Tuesday to disband the Congress of People’s Deputies. “But let us think about Russia.”

Zorkin, who had joined the deputies in branding that move unconstitutional, urged them to accept Yeltsin’s plan to elect a new, smaller Parliament on Dec. 11 if Yeltsin agrees to balloting for a president that same day instead of six months later.

It was not clear whether the jurist’s dramatic appeal, made after what a centrist politician called “very energetic consultations” with Yeltsin aides and opposition leaders, was acceptable to the president.

But on a day of growing displays of government power, it was the first sign of hope for a nonviolent way out of Russia’s most explosive political crisis since the end of Soviet rule. It would require the Congress to recognize Yeltsin’s authority, reversing an impeachment vote that lawmakers cannot enforce.

Yeltsin appeared to ignore the crisis. He spent much of the day hosting leaders of 11 other former Soviet republics, winning their support for his tough measures at home and hammering out an economic cooperation agreement that could reassert some of Moscow’s influence over the former Soviet Union.

Since becoming Russia’s first democratically elected leader in 1991, Yeltsin has been feuding almost constantly with the conservative Congress, which resists not only his free-market reforms but the idea of a strong presidency.

As it became clear Thursday that Yeltsin was winning this climactic showdown, Congress went on record in favor of simultaneous elections of both branches in March. But Zorkin told the deputies Friday, “I assure you, March will be too late.”

Some lawmakers and other opposition figures camped at the White House Parliament building, their ranks thinning and their frustrations boiling over, said Zorkin’s proposal was worth considering.

“When you have to choose between a war in a nuclear country that has had three wars in a century, you must demonstrate the art of the possible on one hand and simple common sense on the other,” Communist Party leader Gennady A. Zyuganov said.

The specter of violent confrontation grew Friday when hundreds of policemen wearing steel helmets and flak jackets encircled 4,000 anti-Yeltsin demonstrators outside the White House, a huge marble building on the banks of the Moscow River, under presidential orders to disarm the lawmakers’ paramilitary guards.

Echoing the fears of people on both sides of the barricades, Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin said Russia “is on the brink, and any false step could lead to catastrophe.”

Despite rumors of an imminent assault, the White House demonstrators held their ground throughout the chilly, rainy day and the police held back. The crowd was tense but orderly as people huddled under umbrellas, listened to speeches and warmed themselves over small bonfires.

Unlike the day before, the paramilitary guards, estimated to number about 1,500, did not brandish their weapons. Parliamentary leaders said the weapons had been collected and stashed inside the White House.

Later in the day, Yeltsin announced, “There will be no storming of the White House.” It appeared that the riot police were trying to choke off the protest by letting people leave the area but blocking anyone trying to enter.

One clash was reported near a subway station a few hundred yards from the White House, when police used clubs to prevent a crowd passing through their barricades. The Interfax news service said some people were injured.

Yeltsin’s order to mobilize the riot police came after eight armed men assaulted the military headquarters of the Commonwealth of Independent States on Thursday night, killing a police inspector and a female bystander.

On Friday, police announced the arrest of Stanislav Terekhov, the leader of the influential right-wing Union of Russian Officers and a key figure in the anti-Yeltsin camp, along with nine other people charged in the assault.

The government reported another raid in which anti-Yeltsin irregular forces seized 400 rifles from an army communications corps base outside Moscow on Wednesday.

Russia’s army has ignored appeals by the opposition to turn against Yeltsin. Although the government reported anti-Yeltsin demonstrations in a dozen cities, most Russians have continued about their normal business.

So has Yeltsin. Having isolated his foes at home, the 62-year-old president scored a foreign policy success by winning approval from nine of Russia’s neighbors for a European Community-style economic union.

In doing so, Yeltsin deflected criticism by his domestic foes that he helped destroy the Soviet Union and weakened Russia. Particularly significant was the participation of Georgia and Azerbaijan, two nations that turned their backs on Moscow after the Soviet empire dissolved in 1991. Only Ukraine and Turkmenistan balked at full participation in the economic union.

The pact commits the signers to work out detailed agreements for coordinating their monetary, trade and immigration policies. Yeltsin said it would broaden Russia’s export markets and help save its flailing economy.

“Our commonwealth now has the real prospect to become the most influential community of nations in the world,” he boasted.

Meanwhile, the man named by Congress to be acting president, Alexander V. Rutskoi, vented his frustration at Yeltsin, at deputies in his own ranks and at Western leaders who refuse to recognize him as Russia’s new leader.

At 10 p.m., the lights in the White House went off as lawmakers tried to conserve power from emergency generators that they are using because the government cut off their electricity.

Rutskoi appeared on a balcony and admonished an apprehensive crowd, which demanded weapons to fight off a feared attack, that the law is the best weapon.

“The situation we are living in is very far from democracy,” he said.

“I have a question to ask Messrs. Clinton, Kohl and Mitterrand,” referring to the U.S. President, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Francois Mitterrand. “I am ashamed at the way they are supporting the criminal regime that destroyed our great Russia.”

Yeltsin has turned up the pressure on lawmakers by also cutting off hot water to the Parliament building and by stripping them of privileges including phones, diplomatic passports and free plane and train tickets.

But he offered to reward deputies who obey his order to disband. He said they could keep their Moscow apartments, take home a year’s pay and find jobs in the government and state-owned industry.

Some deputies have accepted his offer. The most prominent are former Deputy Speaker Nikolai Ryabov, who has been named head of Yeltsin’s elections commission, and Yevgeny Ambartsumov, who headed Parliament’s foreign relations committee. Another dissident deputy, Alexander Pochinok, was appointed deputy finance minister Friday.

Yeltsin’s aides said Friday that just 493 of the original 1,031 Congress deputies remain in the White House.

They are backed, however, by the legislatures in at least 26 of Russia’s 89 republics and autonomous regions. They issued an ultimatum Friday threatening to withhold tax revenue and organize blockades of highways, railways and gas pipelines unless Yeltsin agrees to restore Congress’ authority.

“When Russia’s president and his team closed down Parliament, they simply drove the disease down to the local level,” said Kirsan Ilymzhinov, president of the Russian republic of Kalmykia. “The confrontation will simply spill over from Russia to provincial districts and areas.”

Moscow bureau reporters Sergei Loiko and Andrei Ostroukh contributed to this report.