Yeltsin Warns He May Disband Parliament

President Boris N. Yeltsin threatened Thursday to disband Russia’s combative Parliament and rule by decree, raising the specter of another dramatic power struggle like a 1993 confrontation that ended in gunfire.

Yeltsin defiantly parried the legislators’ no-confidence vote with a demand that the lower house of Parliament, the Duma, revoke its decision within 10 days and cooperate with the leadership or capitulate all power to the increasingly erratic chief executive.

The veiled threat of what would constitute temporary dictatorship came a day after the Duma voted to condemn Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin and his Cabinet for their handling of last week’s deadly hostage-taking incident in the southern town of Budennovsk.

The Duma vote was as much a censure of Yeltsin, who left Russia in the midst of the crisis to attend a largely ceremonial gathering of world leaders in Canada, as it was a denunciation of Chernomyrdin and the defense and police ministries for their failure to protect the Russian public.

But Yeltsin deflected the reprimand by calling on the Duma to revoke that vote or face dismissal.

If the deputies refuse and issue a second no-confidence vote, Yeltsin would be compelled by the constitution to choose between sacking Chernomyrdin and his Cabinet or disbanding the unruly Duma.

At a televised meeting with the Cabinet, he made clear his preference for the government over a Parliament that has blocked many of his attempts at economic and political reform.

“The Duma may sign its own death sentence,” Yeltsin told reporters after the session in which Chernomyrdin called on the deputies to reconsider.

Yeltsin got rid of another uncooperative legislature in October, 1993, when he sent troops and tanks to crush an armed revolt by political opponents who had barricaded themselves inside the Russian Parliament building in a tense standoff with the Kremlin.

That deadly crackdown served to strengthen the opposition, said Mikhail N. Afanasyev of the Presidential Analytical Center here. He predicted that Yeltsin will refrain from disbanding Parliament and thus avoid “stepping on the same rake twice.”

Yeltsin hinted he might offer a face-saving means for the Duma to reverse itself by sacking high officials considered responsible for allowing the Budennovsk blood-letting in which 121 were killed, according to the latest reports.

Chernomyrdin’s concession to peace talks with the Chechen rebels as a condition for release of more than 1,000 hostages grabbed in Budennovsk also may have bolstered the prospects for a negotiated conclusion to the 6-month-old war in Chechnya, which could provide another pretext for reversing the no-confidence vote.

Moscow media and Kremlin officials have been effusive in their predictions of a settlement. Yeltsin publicly conceded for the first time that his government may have “lacked political will and flexibility” in earlier negotiations and depended too much on strong-arm tactics.

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Chernomyrdin appealed in a letter to the fractious Duma to support his government “to overcome the political crisis as soon as possible” for the good of the country and the economy. He said he was calling for an immediate vote of confidence to break a political logjam threatening to stall adoption of a 1996 budget, resolution of the conflict in Chechnya and legislation needed for scheduled parliamentary elections in December.

If the Duma refuses and Yeltsin disbands Parliament, the president will be required to call new elections within four months but would rule unchallenged during the vital campaign season.

Yeltsin’s sparking of the current confrontation was apparently deliberate, as he could have ignored Wednesday’s symbolic vote by the Duma. The president is required to respond only after a second no-confidence vote within three months.

The legislator who initiated Wednesday’s vote, Sergei Y. Glazyev of the Democratic Party of Russia, denounced Yeltsin’s tactical maneuvering as “a provocation.”

Although the polarized Parliament managed to cobble together the needed no-confidence votes from such disparate camps as the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party and pro-market reformers, that cohesion might disappear when the deputies decide whether to write themselves out of the political picture, Western diplomats speculated.

“We have a strange coalition here between Communists and Democrats and just about everyone else in between,” one political attache said of the unusual unity shown Wednesday. “But I think it was a combination of frustrations on Chechnya and Budennovsk that made it possible.”

While noting that the operative word on Yeltsin is “unpredictable,” the envoy deemed it “too early to panic” over whether the president was drifting toward dictatorship.

Some analysts predicted that Yeltsin will fire Interior Minister Gen. Viktor F. Yerin or the head of state security forces, Sergei V. Stepashin, to create the appearance he is responding to the Duma’s criticism and thereby give the deputies a face-saving way of reversing their no-confidence vote.

A session of the Russian Security Council has been called for next Thursday to review the Budennovsk debacle and assign blame.

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Yeltsin, who proclaimed Thursday a day of mourning for the Budennovsk victims, suggested the police and security ministries had been negligent in failing to take preemptive action after a January vow by Chechen rebel leader Dzhokar M. Dudayev to spread the war to Russian territory.

But presidential aide Georgi A. Satarov dismissed as “pure blackmail” suggestions by Duma deputies that they might back off their no-confidence vote if the right heads roll.

Communist Party deputies have concurrently launched an impeachment campaign against Yeltsin, but they would have to prove criminal negligence on the president’s part to unseat him.