Yeltsin Constitution Apparently Passes; Extremists Run Strong : Russia: The ultranationalist movement vies for first place with the president’s supporters in a light turnout. Backlash could produce another hostile Parliament.

A light voter turnout apparently ratified President Boris N. Yeltsin’s post-Soviet constitution Sunday but gave surprisingly strong support to the most extreme opponent of his free-market reforms in Russia’s parliamentary elections.

Exit polls and early unofficial returns showed the movement of ultranationalist firebrand Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky vying closely for first place with Russia’s Choice, the only party among 13 in the race that promised to stay the government’s reformist course.

Zhirinovsky’s forces, Communists and centrists appeared to be winning at least as many seats as Russia’s Choice and its reformist allies--a backlash that could produce a new Parliament nearly as hostile as the one Yeltsin dissolved last September.

Presidential spokesmen early today claimed victory in the vote that mattered most to Yeltsin, a referendum on a charter enshrining Western-style democracy and a strong presidency in place of the Brezhnev-era document that survived the breakup of the Soviet Union two years ago.

But in many ways, Russia’s first multi-party election since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution was a troubling setback for the 62-year-old president and the young liberal reformers he tapped in late 1991 for the enormous task of converting a militarized, command economy to a free market.

The turnout, on a snowy winter day, was so low as to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the whole exercise. Exit polls showed 60% of those who cast ballots approved the constitution.

But well after midnight it was unclear whether 50% of Russia’s 106.5 million voters had taken part in the referendum--the minimum to make the new charter valid.

Interfax news agency quoted the head of the Central Election Commission as telling Yeltsin that the turnout was 55%. And First Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir F. Shumeiko declared: “Today, at long last, the country has embarked on a stable path.”

But the Election Commission delayed a public announcement of the turnout.

The pro-reform party led by Grigory A. Yavlinsky, a leading critic of the new charter, withheld judgment on the result, saying it was possible the figures were being falsified.

Zhirinovsky’s strong showing, coupled with the low turnout, reflected Russians’ weariness with traditional politicians and disillusionment with the inflation, organized crime and social disorder bred by the initial stages of the reforms.

His Liberal Democratic Party appeared to be winning about 20% of the vote for nationwide party slates by promising to revive Russia as a military superpower, halt an ambitious military conversion program, expel millions of non-Russians and end payments on the foreign debt.

In inflammatory speeches, Zhirinovsky has also gone on the record denouncing Jews, Armenians, Azerbaijanis and Georgians, and promising easy access to cheap vodka.

Russia’s Choice was second with 19%, followed by the Communist Party with 12% and Yavlinsky’s party with 11%, according to an exit poll conducted for Cable News Network and CBS-TV and broadcast by those media. Nine other parties got less than 10% each.

“The results of the election correspond to the will of the people who want a different political force,” the 47-year-old Zhirinovsky said, smiling triumphantly and raising a glass at an all-night Kremlin reception open to all candidates. “And they got it. I have never been a Communist, and my party did not support the (Yeltsin) government.”

Pro-reform politicians were stunned by his showing and said it was caused in part by a splitting of their ranks into four different parties.

“In Germany, the fascists came to power because of a split in the anti-fascist ranks, and it would be sad if our lack of coordination plays a similar role in Russian history,” said First Deputy Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar, architect of the reforms and the leader of Russia’s Choice.

Gennady E. Burbulis, one of Yeltsin’s closest advisers, said the election result “means that society is seriously sick. The transition from a totalitarian to a democratic state will be a long one.” He said Yeltsin erred by failing to endorse Russia’s Choice.

Thomas R. Pickering, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, acknowledged in a CNN television interview Sunday night that the vote in support of the new constitution was “lower . . . than we (U.S. officials) anticipated.”

Pickering also said Communist and ultranationalist candidates had gained “in the upper range of predictions for them.” But he said the preliminary results show that Yeltsin will be able to run the country with a coalition government.

Dimitri Simes, a specialist on Russia with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, predicted that the new Russian government will still be friendly to the United States and other Western countries. But he also said he believes that the new government will be somewhat more assertive in championing Russian national interests, because of the need to placate nationalist and other anti-Yeltsin forces in the new legislature.

Yeltsin, halfway through his five-year presidential term, stayed out of the Parliament race to campaign for the constitution, equating it with a vote of confidence in his rule.

It was his first such test since he sent army tanks to subdue armed defenders of the old, dissolved Parliament on Oct. 4, ending a traumatic two-day battle in which 147 people died.

The low turnout in Sunday’s vote indicated that Yeltsin had lost support since last April, when 64% of the voters turned out for a vote of confidence in his mandate and 59% of them expressed support for the president in his struggle with the old Parliament.

Voters queried in the CBS/CNN exit poll were asked whom they would support if presidential elections were held now. Just 39% said they would vote for Yeltsin; 52% said they would vote for someone else.

Many Russians interviewed by The Times said they did not vote Sunday because, after so many elections in the last five years, they believe that the results no longer mattered.

“What’s the point of going to the polls?” asked Vladimir V. Kutumov, a 36-year-old shop clerk. “It is in the best old Communist tradition to decide everything for the people and just pretend they have a say in decisions of state importance.”

A former Communist Party boss, Yeltsin won election as a dissident to the Russian Parliament in March, 1990, and the presidency of Russia in June, 1991. His resistance to a hard-line Communist coup in August, 1991, helped break up the Soviet Union two years ago, and he has spent most of his energy since then in a power struggle with remnants of the old order.

Yeltsin said he dissolved the 1,040-member Parliament because it ignored his mandate in the referendum last April, continued to block Russia’s progress toward free-market democracy, refused to scrap the 1977 Soviet-era constitution and was leading the country toward a civil war.

The constitution apparently adopted Sunday would guarantee all basic civil liberties, including the right not to be wiretapped and the right to own land and other property. It provides for Western-style separation of powers but with a strong president who would name the prime minister, judges and military commanders.

The president can dissolve the Duma, or lower house of Parliament, if it has been sitting for at least a year and fails three straight times to approve his nominee for prime minister or holds a vote of no-confidence in the government twice in three months. Impeaching a president involves both houses and will be harder under the new constitution than the old one.

Communists and some of Yeltsin’s other foes campaigned against the constitution, calling it an attempt to legalize a violent seizure of power. They noted that it was drafted in secret and hard to amend.

Allies who trust Yeltsin’s democratic instincts worried that the charter would be dangerous in the hands of a president like Zhirinovsky.

Yeltsin traveled to a rebellious region of southern Russia to swing local leaders behind his proposal. He went on television to warn of “chaos and disintegration . . . new mutinies and bloody clashes” if voters rejected it. Once he threatened to take away free television time from any party that criticized it on the air.

Many people leaving the polls said they voted for the constitution, with all its flaws, simply because Russia could not do without one.

Yeltsin’s apparent victory was incomplete, however. Voter turnout in several regions and ethnic republics, such as Tatarstan and Sverdlovsk, was well below 50%.

Leaders of those regions and republics campaigned against the constitution, saying it concentrated too much power in Moscow.

They now are expected to cite their own low turnouts in an ongoing struggle for greater autonomy that could strain the unity of Russia.

Yeltsin said before the vote that he was “ready for a constructive dialogue with all political forces” in the new Parliament and promised to refrain from dissolving it except in “extreme cases.”

But the lineup in the two-house Parliament projected from Sunday’s early returns could make it as difficult for Yeltsin to work with as the old one.

Races for the 450-seat Duma provided a clearer test of voter attitudes toward Russia’s post-Communist course. Most of the candidates for the Duma are identified with political parties, while most of those running for the 178-seat Federation Council are independent leaders of the regional governments they will represent in Moscow.

Projections of the Duma’s makeup were sketchy because they were based on unofficial returns from voting for just half the seats. Those 225 seats are to be filled by the political parties whose nationwide slates of candidates got at least 5% of the nationwide vote.

According to preliminary returns, six parties may have achieved that minimum--Zhirinovsky’s party, Russia’s Choice, Yavlinsky’s bloc, the Communists, Women of Russia and the centrist Democratic Party.

Russia’s Choice and Yavlinsky’s bloc appeared to be winning about the same number of seats as Zhirinovsky and the Communists, leaving the other two parties in the center. But the Democratic Party was a strong opponent of Yeltsin in the last Parliament and could tip the balance against him.

Returns from races for the remaining Duma seats--to be filled by one candidate from each of Russia’s 225 election districts--were slower coming. But free-market reformers were expected to fare just as poorly or even worse.

This is because the four pro-reform parties, driven by the policy differences and personal ambitions of their leaders, failed to agree on a bid by Russia’s Choice to avoid competition in the single-seat districts.

Two or more reform candidates ended up competing in 103 districts; centrists ran against each other in 28 districts and Communists in 31.

“Right from the outset the democrats gave up the idea of coordinated activity and quarreled with each other,” said Sergei A. Filatov, Yeltsin’s chief of staff. “This antagonized the electorate.”

Indeed, reformers seemed to enjoy few of the advantages of incumbency--save for slanted news coverage on state television--and all of the burdens of defending a complex economic transformation that so far has hurt more people than it has helped.

Since Gaidar launched Yeltsin’s free-market reform program in January, 1992, the government has freed most prices from state control, privatized about one-third of all state-owned enterprises and created a new class of entrepreneurs. But economists estimate that no more than 10% of the population is better off today.

The rest have suffered through two straight years of quadruple-digit inflation, soaring crime, ethnic tensions and fear of layoffs as the state withdraws subsidies from dying industries.

Many voters said they were appalled by the ruthlessness of Russia’s new market and the growing gap between a rich elite and a poor majority.

More than 1,000 foreign observers accredited by the Election Commission spread across Russia’s 11 time zones to watch balloting at some of its 94,000 polling stations.

By most accounts, voting went smoothly, despite the bewildering array of choices for voters accustomed to one-party rule and the confusion of four separate ballots--five in places such as Moscow with city council races.

In Moscow’s Krasnopresnaya district, elderly voters sat at schoolroom desks, some for as long as 45 minutes, scrutinizing ballots through reading glasses before depositing them in a box. Those who preferred privacy could vote in a booth.

There was no sign that election officials there tried to tell confused voters which boxes to mark on their ballots. “They just told me how to do it, not how I should vote,” said Emelia D. Kazimirchuk, a 59-year-old pensioner.

Official returns are not expected for at least 10 days. But the leading blocs will compete in the coming days for allegiances of the many independent candidates expected to win single-district seats in the Duma.

The shape of those alliances may not be clear until Parliament convenes Jan. 11, a day before President Clinton arrives in Moscow for a summit with Yeltsin.

It is also unsettled where the Parliament will sit. The old Congress of People’s Deputies met in the Kremlin and the Supreme Soviet, the smaller lawmaking body drawn from its ranks, in the White House.

After repairing the fire-damaged White House and scouring its soot-blackened walls, Yeltsin’s aides announced that the huge building on the bank of the Moscow River would be turned over to the executive branch.

Times staff writer Jim Mann in Washington contributed to this story.