Lawmakers Reject Yeltsin’s Anti-Crime Plan as Too Harsh

Russia’s Parliament sent President Boris N. Yeltsin a resounding nyet Wednesday, voting overwhelmingly to reject a presidential anti-crime plan that foes say would wipe out many hard-won new constitutional rights.

Despite a crime wave that has terrorized and enraged many Russians, lawmakers protested that Yeltsin’s harsh cure smelled too much of the odious practices of Soviet days.

His June 12 decree would allow police to detain suspects for 30 days without charges; search offices, cars and passengers without warrants, and inspect bank records of those suspected of organized crime without obtaining a court order. It would also make evidence gathered by wiretapping admissible in court.

“This is exactly how it all began in the ‘30s,” said radical nationalist lawmaker Sergei N. Baburin, referring to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s reign of terror. “We all know what this finally led to.”

The Stalin-era terror was heralded by a 1934 law-and-order decree that made it easier to convict criminals. The campaign is believed to have claimed the lives of at least 20 million people.

On Wednesday, outnumbered democrats in the 6-month-old Duma, the lower house, found themselves--to their astonishment--agreeing with Communists and nationalists in the 279-10 vote. Parliament lacks the power to override a presidential decree, but Yeltsin’s staunchest allies voted to ask him to suspend the anti-crime measures.

The rebuff came even as Yeltsin scored big international gains. In Washington, Russian officials announced that a Clinton-Yeltsin summit will be held in September; in Brussels, Russia at last signed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s “Partnership for Peace” accord--with a side treaty that gave the fallen superpower bragging rights to much of its lost prestige.

Meanwhile, in what appeared to be a trial balloon, Vladimir F. Shumeiko, leader of Parliament’s upper house, told various news organizations that Yeltsin and parliamentary leaders had agreed “in principle” to postpone the 1996 elections for two years.

Ivan Rybkin, leader of the lower house, initially said he liked the idea but on Wednesday told Russian television that it should be treated with caution. The constitution that Yeltsin begged voters to adopt six months ago calls for presidential and parliamentary elections in 1996.

Shumeiko has supported Yeltsin’s most unpopular decisions. When Yeltsin dissolved the old Supreme Soviet in September and promised to run for reelection this month--then changed his mind after his foes were defeated--Shumeiko took to the hustings to defend the president.

There was no immediate reaction to Shumeiko’s statements from the Duma, which was preoccupied with forcing Yeltsin to revise his crime plan.

Former dissident Sergei Kovalyov, chairman of the Human Rights Committee, called the president’s decree an intolerable violation of the civil rights guaranteed by the new constitution. Kovalyov, who was sent to labor camp for defending Andrei D. Sakharov, the late Nobel laureate and human rights activist, said Russia has a bad tradition of letting doctors, not patients, write laws on health care--and police, not citizens, draft criminal codes.

He cited an instance, in the Volga republic of Bashkortostan, in which police were recently permitted to detain suspects for 30 days after a state official was slain.

“Five hundred suspects were detained in a town of 35,000,” Kovalyov said. “Three of the suspects tried to commit suicide, and two quite independently of each other pleaded guilty.”

But Nikolai I. Travkin, leader of the conservative Democratic Party of Russia, called Kovalyov one of “God’s fools.”

“They would let half the country be shot in the street but not a single criminal’s human rights may be violated,” he said. “Today we will not conquer crime by normal, civilized methods. It is overwhelming us.”

Yeltsin’s decree took a drubbing in Moscow’s most influential newspapers. One of its only backers was Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, the famed, Nobel Prize-winning author who returned to Russia last month from exile in Vermont and is now lamenting the moral decline of his homeland.

Neo-fascist lawmaker Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, predictably, denounced the Yeltsin decree as insufficiently tough. He said he would introduce his own Draconian plan Friday.

Yeltsin’s promise to crack down on “criminal filth” followed a bloody spring of bombings, killings, kidnaping, hostage-taking and hijacking, as well as street crime--which has grown all too common here.

One Yeltsin aide warned lawmakers not to discredit themselves by appearing to be soft on crime; both sides promised to seek compromise. The Kremlin and Duma are each at work revising the unwieldy Soviet-era criminal code.