Yeltsin Backers Form Party, Launch Election Campaign : Russia: The group seeks to get as many reformist candidates as possible elected to Parliament.

Several hundred top supporters of President Boris N. Yeltsin, united under the slogan “Freedom, Property and Legality,” assembled Saturday to found what could become Russia’s dominant party and to launch their campaign for crucial Dec. 12 elections.

Official delegates and just about everybody who’s anybody in the pro-Yeltsin camp came together in a new bloc known as Russia’s Choice, which aims to get as many reformist candidates as it can elected to Russia’s new Parliament.

“This is the beginning of the consolidation of all democratic forces” in Russia, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, Sergei A. Filatov, told the packed auditorium at the Filmmakers’ Union headquarters in central Moscow.

With many of the strongest Communist and nationalist opposition parties banned and their newspapers closed down in the wake of Moscow’s political violence earlier this month, Russia’s Choice has rosy prospects for the elections. Krasnaya Zvezda, the army newspaper, predicted Saturday that Yeltsin’s backers could garner up to 60% at the polls.

If, that is, they can stick together. As Russia’s fledgling political parties called hasty conferences this weekend to gear up for the campaign, Yeltsin’s supporters already appeared to be splintering.

Deputy Prime Minister Sergei M. Shakhrai held a founding conference in Novgorod for a new reformist party, to be called Russian Unity and Harmony. And at the two-day Russia’s Choice conference, the bloc was already deep in a nasty dispute over what role it would give the Democratic Russia movement, Yeltsin’s longtime allies.

Despite the internal rumblings, Russia’s Choice got a strong start on working out its election platform and concept for the new Parliament to replace the conservative body that Yeltsin dissolved Sept. 21, triggering a deadly armed standoff.

Gennady E. Burbulis, head of the pro-Yeltsin think tank known as Strategy and long Yeltsin’s unofficial chief tactician, presented the “Freedom, Property and Legality” slogan, saying the triad is “amazingly exact” in defining what Yeltsin’s supporters stand for.

First Deputy Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar, the top leader of Russia’s Choice, said the bloc must have the political will to refrain from unrealistic campaign promises and push for economic austerity instead, calling for cutbacks in state credits and subsidies.

“We understand that we’re giving a trump card to our enemies with this. But we’re convinced we have no other responsible way out.” He said that Russia’s Choice should be “the party of order--democratic and market order.”

“We can promise little,” he said, “but stable currency, stable power, stable legislation defending private property and distribution to the most needy.”

The congress carried a note of extra urgency because the success of Russia’s Choice in the elections will largely determine Parliament’s shape.

It was Parliament’s relentless opposition to Yeltsin and his reforms that led to Yeltsin’s decision to dissolve it and to the subsequent violence that left at least 193 dead in Moscow.

“The country can’t survive another Parliament that engages in nothing but political struggle,” Filatov said.

Authorities said Saturday that security forces have captured one of the most prominent hard-liners accused of leading the armed resistance to Yeltsin.

Ilya Konstantinov, head of the National Salvation Front, was apprehended in Moscow on Friday after 11 days on the run, a Security Ministry spokesman said. He was a member of the Parliament dissolved by Yeltsin and is accused of encouraging the armed militants who attacked government buildings Oct. 3.

Yeltsin stayed away from the Russia’s Choice meeting Saturday. His spokesman, Vyacheslav Kostikov, said the Russian president believed he should be seen as the leader of all Russians and not only of a particular bloc.

The level of support Yeltsin will have in the Parliament is key not only for his reforms but for his own fate. Yeltsin has called presidential elections for June 12 even though his term would normally have run until 1996.

But on Friday, Yeltsin left open the possibility that if lawmakers decide there is no need for elections, he could stay on through 1996. Kostikov confirmed that possibility.

If the new Parliament “decides that for the stability of Russia it makes more sense for the president to finish out his term, I don’t exclude this decision. But a lot depends on the federal assembly and the voice of Russia itself.”