Yeltsin Rejects Compromise on Elections

Saying “I am not going to compromise,” President Boris N. Yeltsin on Monday ruled out the simultaneous elections for president and Parliament that his foes hinted they might accept to end Russia’s 6-day-old political crisis.

Refusing to bow to regional leaders, an ad hoc group of centrists and Russia’s Constitutional Court, all of whom have urged the president to consider simultaneous elections, Yeltsin went on national television and insisted that he will stick to his original timetable of parliamentary elections Dec. 11-12 and presidential elections June 12.

“Dual power is dangerous, but lack of power is more dangerous,” Yeltsin said, arguing that simultaneous elections would leave neither branch of power in full command.

Yeltsin’s archfoe, Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, chairman of the Parliament that refuses to disband, earlier Monday had also ruled out a compromise. He promised to defend the Parliament building, or White House, “to the last bullet” against what he called “the putsch leaders.”

Outside the White House, where a stepped-up police presence was making an angry crowd even more edgy, reaction to Yeltsin’s speech was swift and hostile.

Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi, who has claimed the powers of the presidency since Yeltsin dissolved Parliament, came out on the White House balcony to urge the crowd of about 4,000 to “stand to the end” in opposing a “dictatorship on Russian soil.”

An unknown number of members of the Soviet-era Congress of People’s Deputies remained barricaded inside the Parliament building, where telephones, electricity and hot water have been cut off. Lawmakers with dark circles under their eyes ate cold cheese and sausage sandwiches and roamed the dark, cavernous hallways with candles and flashlights.

Little of what goes on inside the gloomy marble fortress is reaching the public, however, as Russian television and radio continue to clamp down on coverage of the anti-Yeltsin camp.

The official Itar-Tass news agency, quoting the presidential news service, warned that anyone going to the White House could be taken hostage--a threat that was quickly relayed by Russian radio. The 8 p.m. “All Russia” news program allotted 42 seconds of the 20-minute broadcast to the doings of Yeltsin’s opponents.

“We are in an information blockade,” Rutskoi said.

Yeltsin administration officials said they are working out plans to restrict access to the White House because, as an unnamed official told the independent Interfax news agency, “In the ranks of the so-called ‘defenders of Parliament’ are more than a few people with psychological disorders and drunks, who threaten to use the weapons they have been given.”

Several hundred Interior Ministry troops arrived at the White House on Monday morning, and more police officers who set up roadblocks at every access street said they had orders to keep all journalists, “former deputies,” deliveries and ordinary people out.

“This is democracy? And Clinton loves him!” Vladimir Kotchenko railed as he watched a small band of people hurling insults at the burly police officers who would not allow them to pass.

On the north side of the White House on Monday morning, a mob tried to force its way through a line of truncheon-wielding Interior Ministry troops. One woman was injured and taken away in an ambulance, witnesses said.

Reinforcements poured out of trucks parked nearby, and about 250 troops stood for nearly two hours sandwiched between the furious crowd of demonstrators inside the White House grounds and another furious crowd outside.

In what their commanders said was an attempt to prevent bloodshed, the troops were at last ordered to open a corridor to let the crowd outside pass. About 1,400 people surged through the barricades, some holding icons, others waving red flags and singing Bolshevik songs, many lugging heavy shopping bags of food for their comrades inside.

Most Muscovites treated the spectacle with indifference. A new Moscow Poll released by the Opinion firm showed nearly 61% of the 900 Russians surveyed approved of Yeltsin’s decision to dissolve Parliament and call new elections. About 19% disapproved, up from 14.5% in last week’s survey.

Meanwhile, the shadowboxing continued between Yeltsin and the Parliament that refuses to be dissolved. News reports that the Parliament’s newly appointed “security minister,” Viktor P. Barannikov, had “defected” to the Yeltsin camp sent rumors flying around Moscow that the opposition had crumbled.

But the rumors were refuted by Barannikov himself, who gave a late-afternoon news conference inside a White House room whose 15 chandeliers gave off only the reflected light of battery-powered television cameras.

Together with Parliament’s other two “alternative” ministers, the former KGB head called for simultaneous elections. He also said he had received assurances from the Yeltsin camp that there would be no storming of the White House.

All three shadow ministers said that they were in touch with their counterparts in the government--but that so far there had been no talk of any compromise.