Legislators Pardon Yeltsin Opponents : Russia: The 253-67 vote declares amnesty for alleged coup plotters and those charged in battle for Parliament. Reformist deputy calls measure ‘beginning of civil war.’

In a stunning challenge to Boris N. Yeltsin, lawmakers voted Wednesday to pardon all of the Russian president’s foes who face charges for their roles in political violence, from the 1991 coup attempt to last October’s battle for the Moscow White House.

The Duma, the lower house of Parliament, voted 253 to 67 to declare amnesty for all the alleged traitors after its Communist chairman, Ivan Rybkin, argued that doing so would be a step toward “civic peace and harmony.”

Yeltsin’s allies saw the amnesty instead as a move toward disaster, what reformist Deputy Sergei Yushenkov called “the beginning of civil war in Russia.” A presidential spokesman condemned it as “a dangerous path that contradicts the national interests.”

Rowdy opposition rallies in Moscow marking the Russian holiday that honors the military provided a taste of what may lie ahead, with about 10,000 protesters near the Kremlin calling for Yeltsin’s ouster. When told of the amnesty, the crowd cried thunderously, “Hurrah!”

The broad pardon set the stage ominously for Yeltsin’s State of the Nation address today to the new Russian Parliament, which came into being under a new constitution last month after Yeltsin dissolved the old Parliament in September because it blocked his reforms.

If the Communist-nationalist coalition that supported the amnesty holds and all the opposition leaders do go free, Russia appears doomed again to the cycle of endless political battles that Yeltsin tried to break in September at an ultimate cost of more than 140 lives.

Yeltsin’s spokesman, Vyacheslav V. Kostikov, said the amnesty is “a challenge to Russian democracy” and a sign that the Duma learned nothing from the old Supreme Soviet, which Yeltsin ended up getting rid of with tanks and troops in October after it defied his order to dissolve. But Kostikov did not indicate whether Yeltsin will oppose the amnesty.

“There is nothing the president can do to legally reverse the decision,” said Sergei A. Pashin, one of Yeltsin’s top legal advisers. The Duma has a clear right under the new constitution to issue amnesties, and the decision is not subject to a presidential veto because it is not a new law but simply a resolution.

Journalists and some relatives began a vigil Wednesday afternoon outside Lefortovo prison, waiting for the release of former Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi, former Parliament Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov and others jailed after the October clashes.

The aging accused plotters of the 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who was then president of the Soviet Union, have been living at home as their trial has dragged on month after month.

There was no immediate sign of when the Lefortovo prisoners would be released. Some Yeltsin aides predicted that although the Russian president cannot stop the amnesty, he can put it off by waging a legal battle claiming that pardons cannot be issued to people who have not been convicted.

Others, however, expect the release at Lefortovo to come today, when Russian prosecutors get the official papers needed from the Duma.

The prospect of the return to the streets and podiums of such deputies-turned-rebels as Ilya V. Konstantinov, the bellicose leader of the banned National Salvation Front, was a daunting one indeed for the Yeltsin camp.

“People like Ilya Konstantinov are untamable,” said Leonid Smirnyagin, a presidential adviser. “They do not submit to the logic of history and will again try to reunite the irreconcilable opposition under their banner.”

At the opposition rally in front of the Bolshoi Theater, however, protesters exulted at the likelihood that their fight against Yeltsin will resume with full force.

“This will mean a revival of the movement for Russia’s liberation from Yeltsin’s capitalist puppet regime,” said Tatyana Shevchuk, a 57-year-old retired biology teacher.

“This serves the ultimate purpose of getting rid of the president,” said Andrei Bondarev, 27. “We do not need American valets as Russian president. The Russian people need a true Russian president, and we have one: Alexander Rutskoi!”

Despite the danger of freeing opposition agitators, Duma deputies said they had voted for the amnesty because they believed it was time to do whatever it took to create the national unity needed to straighten out the economy.

“This gives us a chance to start movement in the direction of harmony,” said Sergei M. Shakhrai, a former member of Yeltsin’s government. “Russia has a chance now, and so do its main political forces.”

In the Duma vote, only the most pro-Yeltsin faction, Russia’s Choice, appeared to have opposed the amnesty.

Extremist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democrats, Communists and several moderate factions supported it.

The Duma thus lived up to all the gloomy predictions that it would, in essence, be no better than the Supreme Soviet that Yeltsin dissolved.

Yeltsin can only hope that his powers under the new constitution are great enough to allow him to shrug off the constant resistance from lawmakers that led him to dissolve the last Parliament. He can also hope that enough has changed so that Rutskoi, Khasbulatov and others will find it hard to re-enter politics.

“In the time that those guilty in the tragic events of Oct. 3-4 were in prison, a new statehood has been created in Russia, in which Rutskoi, Khasbulatov and others have no part,” Smirnyagin said.

That new statehood, however, has drawbacks for Yeltsin as well. Before December elections brought Russia its new constitution, he could bend the law and justify it by claiming he was more legitimate than Russia’s patched-up old constitution because he had been elected by the people.

Now, however, he would seem to be stuck with the system of power he helped to create.

The Duma’s amnesty provides the first real test of whether Yeltsin plans to abide by the new division of powers or to try once again to ignore it and claim presidential rights--such as, perhaps, the right to block an amnesty--that the constitution does not actually give him.

Andrei Ostroukh of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.