Moscow Siege Pact Snags on Arms Surrender

A tentative agreement to lift President Boris N. Yeltsin’s blockade of the Parliament headquarters collapsed Friday as hard-line legislators barricaded there voted down its requirement that they surrender their weapons.

Instead they insisted that Yeltsin rescind his Sept. 21 decree dissolving Parliament and call simultaneous elections for both the presidency and national legislature.

But although Yeltsin and Parliament leaders traded barbs and insults throughout the day, both sides continued the effort to negotiate an end to the standoff in talks sponsored by Russia’s senior churchman.

One participant even termed the first day’s results “optimistic.” The negotiations are scheduled to resume this morning at Moscow’s historic Danilovsky Monastery, the seat of Orthodox Patriarch Alexi II.

Moreover, Yeltsin reiterated assurances that he has no intention of ending the siege by force.

Nevertheless, the obstinacy of both parties in the political and physical stalemate appeared to harden in the aftermath of the lawmakers’ unexpected rejection of a preliminary deal.

And there was still no sign that Yeltsin would reconsider his rejection of the deputies’ demand for simultaneous elections, a “zero-option” scenario that might address the deeper political disagreement underlying the Moscow standoff.

The president continued to come under pressure from regional legislatures across Russia, many of which back the plan for simultaneous elections, possibly in February or March. Deputy Prime Minister Sergei M. Shakhrai, hastily dispatched Thursday halfway across the country to the Siberian metropolis of Novosibirsk, failed to win over a council of 19 Siberian regions, which had earlier threatened to block the Trans-Siberian Railway and restrict deliveries of oil and gas to the central government if it continued to reject the “zero option.”

Yeltsin, in a staged midday interview on state television devoted to the Moscow crisis, insisted: “Any talks, any talks whatsoever, must begin with the surrender of weapons because they are so dangerous. Any shot, even a chance one, is an act of provocation that will cause bloodshed, and this is unacceptable.”

For their part, Parliament leaders called Yeltsin a “gangster” and “dictator.”

“Our conviction is more firm that the turning stage has begun and the junta will definitely be overthrown from its Kremlin posts,” said Parliament Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, one of Yeltsin’s most implacable opponents.

Behind the screen of invective, however, the negotiators at the monastery succeeded in establishing a six-person commission to begin taking an inventory of the firepower in the hands of the barricaded legislators and their guard. The panel will also analyze how to disarm the parliamentary militia peacefully. The group, comprising three members from each side, was to begin its work Friday night and report to the negotiators this morning.

Tension around the downtown Moscow White House, the Parliament headquarters, has grown more acute since Yeltsin abruptly dissolved the hostile Parliament on Sept. 21 and called elections to an entirely new legislative body for Dec. 11 and 12. Two days later, he scheduled presidential elections for June 12, two years early.

In his television appearance Friday, he said that he had not yet decided whether to run for reelection.

In the days following his initial order, Yeltsin tightened the security cordon around the White House with thousands of government troops and riot police, and he cut off its power, water, heat and telephone communications.

He appealed to the hundreds of people’s deputies inside the building to abandon its defense, offering them jobs in government ministries and advances on their salaries. On Friday, he hinted broadly that job openings were running out.

“I want to state for those in the White House that we do not have anything against any of them except their leaders,” he said. “They are free to leave and find new jobs,” he added, obligingly giving the address of an office the government has set up to take deputies’ job applications.

Government aides also sought to play up the danger posed by bands of uncontrollable armed men roaming the Parliament’s hallways seeking opportunities for provocation--the government’s chief rationale for its security ring around the building.

“There are psychologically abnormal people, adventurists and political extremists there who would attempt to make the current complex situation hotter,” said Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, a Yeltsin emissary to the monastery negotiations, after the talks broke off for the night on Friday.

One Yeltsin aide on Friday called the legislature “the best-armed Parliament in the world” and charged that even a surface-to-air missile had found its way inside the White House.

Vyacheslav Ogorodnikov, an official of the Interior Ministry, also charged that the Parliament militia had 1,600 submachine guns, more than 2,000 pistols, 18 machine guns and 12 grenade launchers.

The figures were more than twice the government’s previous estimates of legislative firepower. Parliament’s shadow security minister, Viktor P. Barannikov, denied the presence of a “Stinger” missile in the building and said that only “standard weapons” were being carried. Witnesses reported seeing nothing more potent than semiautomatic weapons in the hallways.

Government officials also asserted that as many as 1,000 people were still in the White House, including a 400-man militia; the number of actual legislators inside, however, remained cloudy. More than 600 convened in the building on Sept. 22, but hundreds have left since then.

The legislative arsenal was the focus of the tentative agreement reached late Thursday night and repudiated hours later.

Under that agreement, initialed at 2:40 a.m. Friday by representatives of the president and Parliament, the legislators were in essence to trade their weapons for the restoration of electricity, water and some telephone service to the 22-story White House.

The power came on about 9 a.m., but as Yeltsin complained on television, “they refused to surrender their weapons.”

Instead, the legislators responded with a counterproposal under which the government would send its troops and riot police back to barracks before any surrender of arms took place. The plan was rejected out of hand.

Yeltsin’s chief negotiator, Chief of Staff Sergei A. Filatov, said late Friday that he thought the lawmakers were using the church’s intervention to prolong the confrontation.

“I have a feeling that the other side just keeps the negotiating process running in order not to lose political face,” said Filatov, openly disappointed at Parliament’s rejection of the late-night agreement. “Tomorrow we’ll have to start from where we were before signing.”

Times staff writer Sonni Efron and Andrei Ostroukh of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this story.

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