Communists Accuse Yeltsin of Threatening Democracy : Russia: Party warns it may sue president for defamation after he equated it with extremism and suggested outlawing it.

In a role reversal illustrative of Russia’s perplexing political scene, Communist leaders Saturday accused President Boris N. Yeltsin of undermining multi-party democracy with his vow to prevent their return to power.

The Russian Communist Party threatened to sue Yeltsin for defamation after he equated their resurgent and largely reformed movement with ultranationalists and extremists who want to destroy the country’s fledgling democratic institutions.

“We consider Yeltsin’s appraisal insulting,” Communist Party leader Gennady A. Zyuganov said in an interview. “Ninety percent of the Russian people don’t support him; they support those against him.”

As Communist fortunes have risen among a population still suffering a free fall in real incomes four years into the transition to a market economy, Yeltsin’s support has eroded, and he has fought back by threatening legitimate opponents, Zyuganov said.

Other party leaders lashed out at Yeltsin for attempting to interfere with parliamentary elections set for Dec. 17.

“The country’s top official, bound to safeguard the constitution and law, in fact directly backed a side in the election struggle and intentionally authorized any actions against opposition forces,” fumed Anatoly I. Lukyanov, head of the Communist Party’s parliamentary faction in the Duma, Russia’s lower house of Parliament.

Lukyanov said Yeltsin had in effect given “a signal to all truly extremist forces” to attack Communists and their allies with impunity.

In a Thursday interview with U.S. and Russian journalists, Yeltsin was asked about pollsters’ predictions that the Communists will win a sizable share of Duma seats in the election, if not an outright majority.

“Our task is to prevent this,” Yeltsin responded, adding that the former ruling party could be outlawed if it appeared on the verge of coming back to power.

He described the Communists as extremists and lumped them together with ultranationalist radicals headed by Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky as a threat to the future of Russian democracy.

A leader of the Communist-allied Agrarian Party said Yeltsin is instigating a “witch hunt” and trying to provoke civil unrest in unsteady Russia.

“Neither the Communists nor the Agrarian Party have ever concealed their program goals and their drive to come to power in a constitutionally democratic way,” Agrarian leader Mikhail I. Lapshin told farmers during a speech in Novosibirsk on Friday, the Interfax news agency reported.

The angry reactions of leading Communists have been bolstered by expressions of concern among nonpartisan election monitors.

“The Communists are going to do well in this election, and if Yeltsin hinders the activity of the Communist Party, the legitimacy of the election and the legitimacy of the next Duma are going to be in question,” warned David Merkel, director of the International Republican Institute monitoring program for Russia.

Merkel said Yeltsin’s thinly veiled threats to shut down the Communists exacerbated the menacing comments a few days earlier by his chief of staff, Sergei A. Filatov, who warned that an electoral victory by the Communists could plunge Russia into civil war.

Zyuganov has described his party as a wholly different entity from the Communist Party that wielded dictatorial power over the Soviet Union for more than seven decades.

He has also noted that Yeltsin’s current anti-Communist diatribes come in the wake of the president’s long career inside the Soviet Communist Party.

Yeltsin rose to the party’s top ranks, Zyuganov pointed out, before he fell out with former President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and lost his positions and privileges in the late 1980s.