Yeltsin Backs Off From Early Vote on His Presidency : Russia: Retreating from June elections, the leader says he wants to stay in office until 1996 to groom successor. Remarks come as Moscow braces for hard-line protests.

Retreating from a promise to submit himself to the voters once again, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin said Saturday that he opposes holding early presidential elections in June.

Instead, Yeltsin told a closed-door meeting of the heads of Russia’s mass media that he wants to finish his five-year term, which ends in 1996, and does not plan to run for reelection, Russian news agencies reported.

“Everyone knows how many blows of fate have been my lot,” Yeltsin said. “This is too much for one person.” The 62-year-old Siberian said he considers it his task to find and groom a successor.

The president’s remarks came as Moscow braced for the possibility of a renewed spasm of violence today. Supporters of outlawed hard-line parties have vowed to defy a ban on public demonstrations and rally in October Square to commemorate the 76th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Police were placed on alert and told to expect violence. On Saturday night, television showed footage of riot police training with truncheons, rifles and water cannon. Hospitals were told to prepare for casualties.

“We are getting ready for a meat mincer,” said a doctor who tended those wounded in the Oct. 3-4 armed uprising and military crackdown. “I hardly have time to wash my hands from blood of the putsch, and here we go again.”

Yeltsin’s about-face had been rumored for nearly a week, but it apparently caught his chief of staff by surprise. About an hour before Yeltsin’s meeting with the media bosses, Sergei A. Filatov, the head of the presidential staff, told the Interfax news agency that Yeltsin would not cancel the June election.

In Washington, State Department officials said they were trying to determine exactly what Yeltsin meant. If Yeltsin calls off the presidential election, it would be an embarrassment to the Clinton Administration. Last month, as they supported Yeltsin’s decision to suspend the old, conservative-dominated Parliament, both President Clinton and Secretary of State Warren Christopher pointed to Yeltsin’s willingness to run for reelection as evidence of his fidelity to democracy.

U.S. officials said there have been signs that Yeltsin did not want to serve a full second term, and they speculated that the Russian president has tried to stave off a new election so as to postpone his decision on that issue.

Yeltsin has moved swiftly to consolidate his position in the month since an armed mob of Communist and nationalist hard-liners rampaged through Moscow and nearly toppled his presidency until army tanks and troops quashed the uprising by shelling and storming the Parliament building, known as the White House.

Yeltsin threw the leaders of the uprising into a KGB prison, banned extremist newspapers and political parties, closed the Constitutional Court and forced hostile regional soviets to dissolve themselves.

His new draft constitution, to be published Wednesday, does not grant Russia’s fractious regions the sovereignty they sought. But last week Yeltsin told regional leaders that he would approve the constitution himself if they did not. Yeltsin’s draft will be put to a referendum during parliamentary elections Dec. 12.

The president also has approved a new military doctrine that states that Russia may use nuclear weapons if attacked with conventional forces and allows Russian troops to be stationed abroad.

During his long struggle with the conservative Parliament, Yeltsin consistently rejected his enemies’ demands that he hold early presidential elections.

But Sept. 18, as a last-ditch bid for compromise with the mutinous Parliament, Yeltsin agreed to hold presidential elections in June, two years ahead of schedule--if legislative elections were held six months earlier.

The offer was spurned. Yeltsin dissolved Parliament three days later. He decreed Dec. 12 elections for a new Federal Assembly and a few days later ordered a June 12 presidential poll.

Within a month, the president’s men began hinting that Russia’s first democratically elected president “was under no moral obligation” to hold early elections.

They argued that Yeltsin was legitimately elected in 1991 and had confirmed his mandate by winning a popular referendum last April.

Although Yeltsin won a resounding vote of confidence in his leadership and his economic policies in the April referendum, the verdict on early elections was less clear. A surprising 49.5% of voters favored early presidential elections and 30% were opposed, while 67% wanted early parliamentary elections and only 19% were opposed.

Until Saturday, the president’s men had said that the new legislature to be elected in December would decide the timing of presidential elections.

State Department officials made the same point Saturday in Washington. “Our understanding is that this doesn’t change the legal or constitutional situation,” one official said. “This appears to be Boris Yeltsin expressing his personal preference. . . . It will still be up to the Parliament to decide whether there are new elections.”

Valery D. Zorkin, the former Constitutional Court chairman who revealed last week that he was forced by threats to resign in the aftermath of the October rebellion, said the change in tone from Yeltsin’s aides reminded him of “the irreplaceable and dear Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev.”

Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev defended Yeltsin’s decision, saying that the people should give their president a chance to conduct his reforms without ceaseless political turmoil.

Yeltsin’s move was interpreted by some as a sign of insecurity on the day his fledgling coalition, Russia’s Choice, was scrambling to collect the 100,000 signatures needed to qualify for the December parliamentary ballot in time to meet Saturday’s midnight deadline.

Yeltsin’s popularity has suffered from the October bloodshed. A U.S. News & World Report poll found 50% of Russians approve of the way Yeltsin is doing his job and that 38% disapprove. But 61% said Yeltsin should not be reelected.

The coming winter is expected to bring unusually cold weather as well as bankruptcies, unemployment, higher bread prices and more economic hardship.

“In June, Yeltsin would not be sure of victory,” said Alexander A. Pikayev of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, a Moscow think tank.

Yeltsin’s historic mandate is “to push Russia through the lowest point of the U-turn of development,” and the country has not yet hit bottom, Pikayev said. If he is to lay solid foundations for the new Russia, Yeltsin cannot afford to waste six months on an election campaign that will force him to promise to spend money Russia does not have, Pikayev said.

“Retreating from early presidential elections is a sign of weakness--but it’s a price he wants to pay for the hope of stabilization,” he said.

Although Yeltsin’s democratic allies may not like it, they cannot afford to criticize their president. If they make a good showing in the December elections, they can argue that Yeltsin’s democratic mandate has been confirmed, Pikayev said. If they do poorly, the democrats will need a strong Yeltsin to safeguard free-market reforms against a revanchist legislature.

Some Russians accepted Yeltsin’s canceled election with the shrugs and black humor they perfected for coping with life in the old Soviet Union.

“He is the boss. He enjoys unlimited authority,” said Irina G. Popova, a historian at the Institute of Social Anthropology.

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation--recently unbanned by Yeltsin and promising a strong showing in the December elections--was not in the least surprised.

Yeltsin’s promise of a June presidential election “was a tricky tactic to justify disbanding Parliament,” said its spokesman, Nikolai T. Konyaev.

Konyaev said that Communist Party leader Gennady A. Zyuganov had called on his supporters to avoid conflict today and instead commemorate the 1917 revolution by laying a wreath on V. I. Lenin’s mausoleum in Red Square.

Zyuganov has the most to lose if violence breaks out. His is the only Communist organization allowed to participate in the elections, and it claims to have gathered 150,000 signatures, well above the 100,000 needed to qualify.

The Justice Ministry warned of demonstrations by Working Russia, the Officer’s Union, the Russian Communist Workers Party and other groups that were blamed for organizing or fomenting the October violence and are now “suspended” from electoral politics. If these groups or others demonstrate today, the Justice Ministry has vowed to press “the question of their liquidation.”

If Revolution Day passes without violence, however, the parliamentary election campaign will begin in earnest this week, with up to 20 parties and coalitions competing.

Times staff writer Doyle McManus in Washington contributed to this article.