Regime Hung by Thread, Yeltsin Says of Revolt

President Boris N. Yeltsin, in a detailed new account Sunday of the violent uprising against him last October, says he met with paralysis and face-to-face insubordination among army officers and elite combat troops before they finally moved to recapture the Russian White House.

“The lawful government hung by a thread, but the army did not feel able to defend it--some soldiers . . . didn’t feel like fighting,” Yeltsin writes in his memoirs, excerpts of which appeared in Newsweek and the Sunday Times of London. The 63-year-old president describes the showdown with his foes in Parliament as “the bleakest days of my life.”

Yeltsin’s version makes it clear that army resistance to his orders went much further than officially acknowledged at the time. It also portrays a leader tactically and psychologically unprepared for the violent showdown that he in fact provoked by illegally dissolving Parliament two weeks earlier.

The memoirs--to be published next week under different titles in the United States, Britain and Russia--is certain to revive bitter debate here over who caused the 147 deaths in two days of fighting that ended Oct. 4 with a hesitant tank assault on the rebel-held Parliament building.

And, with rebel leaders out of jail under an amnesty and engaged again in anti-government activism, the book raises the question of whether Yeltsin can count on the army to save him again. Among those depicted as weak and wavering figures is Gen. Pavel S. Grachev, who is still army commander and defense minister.

Yeltsin admits being seized by self-doubt during the October violence and by depression afterward.

“For the first time in my life I was tortured by the thought--had I done the right thing? Was there another option? Russia was drowning in lawlessness. And here I was, the first popularly elected president, breaking the law--albeit a bad law, a cumbersome law that was pushing the country to the brink of collapse.”

A self-described insomniac, Yeltsin said he often awoke at 2 or 3 a.m. to work on the memoirs, which are being published by Times Book/Random House and Belka Publishing Co. under the title “The Struggle for Russia.” A British edition, “The View From the Kremlin,” will be published by Harper Collins. The Russian edition is titled “Notes of the President.”

The book takes up where “Against the Grain,” Yeltsin’s first autobiography, left off, with his comeback from disgrace as a maverick Communist to get elected to Parliament in 1990. It covers his election as president of Russia a year later and offers new details of how he escaped arrest to lead resistance to the failed August, 1991, coup by hard-line Soviet Communists.

In the excerpted versions, Yeltsin offers no hint about whether he is terminally ill, as it is often rumored here.

But he predicts “more cataclysms . . . new fighters, fanatics and leaders, with or without epaulets” as Russia withdraws from its totalitarian past. He says neo-fascist leader Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky’s strong showing in parliamentary elections last December shows Russia is ripe for “a mad leader.”

At a time of rising nationalist sentiment in Russia, Yeltsin exudes admiration for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the U.S. political system, especially the way George Bush and Bill Clinton cooperated after the 1992 campaign. “In our country, they would have remained mortal enemies,” he comments.

Yeltsin discloses that he decided to dissolve Russia’s unruly, reactionary Parliament after German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, visiting Russia in July, made it clear that Western leaders would tolerate such an unconstitutional act.

However, Yeltsin admits, “we were not ready to fight. There was no battle plan.” He hoped that isolating the White House and ignoring the rebels would force them to surrender, but “we were tragically mistaken.”

After armed rebels attacked the mayor’s office and the state television studios Oct. 3, Yeltsin got Grachev’s promise to bring army troops into Moscow, and he was incensed to learn later that they had stopped outside the city.

“I was trying to bring my combat generals out of their state of stress and paralysis” that night, he writes. “Not even one regiment could be found to come to Moscow and defend the city. It was a dismal picture.”

Yeltsin offers striking new details of his decisive post-midnight meeting at the Defense Ministry. The generals were grim and devoid of ideas, he writes, until an obscure, timid captain from the presidential security team was called in to outline a plan to assault the White House with 10 tanks.

“With an actual battle plan before them, the generals came alive,” Yeltsin recalls. It was 3 a.m. Division commanders said the tanks could be in place by dawn.

Then Grachev intervened, asking Yeltsin if he was giving specific orders to use tanks in Moscow. Rebuked by Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin for his doubts, Grachev “mumbled in a hurt voice,” Yeltsin writes.

At 5 a.m., Yeltsin says, he encountered new resistance, this time from the elite Alpha and Vympel units that were assigned key roles in the assault. Yeltsin describes the scene:

“Thirty of them were waiting for me; they all rose to greet me. . . . I looked at them one by one; almost all of them lowered their eyes.

“I barked: ‘Are you prepared to fulfill the president’s orders?’ There was only silence--a terrible, inexplicable silence. Nobody uttered a word.

“I waited for a minute; still nobody uttered a word. I finally growled: ‘Then I’ll put it another way: Are you refusing to obey the president’s order?’ Again, silence. I turned on my heel and strode toward the door, calling out that the order must be obeyed.”

Yeltsin says both units still refused to take part and “dug their heels in” 500 yards from the White House. Only when a sniper killed one of their officers did Alpha swing into action. “That single shot was the turning point,” the president writes.