Millionaires Ease Away From Yeltsin

Unnerved by his weak popular support, an elite circle of Russian bankers and industrialists backed away from President Boris N. Yeltsin on Friday and urged him and his Communist rival to strike a deal to avert any violent struggle for power after the June 16 presidential election.

Their declaration of neutrality was a striking expression of doubt--by those with the most to lose--about the beleaguered incumbent’s chances of beating Communist leader Gennady A. Zyuganov by a clear and fair margin at the polls.

“At this crucial hour,” they said, “we call on . . . all those who hold real power in Russia and on whom its destiny depends to join forces in search of a political compromise to prevent acute conflicts that would threaten the basic interests of Russia and its very statehood.”

The unusual capitalist manifesto, which appears in today’s edition of the Izvestia newspaper, is signed by 13 millionaire bankers, oil tycoons and industrial barons who have profited mightily under Yeltsin’s vast redistribution of property from the Soviet-era state to private hands.

Zyuganov has called for renationalizing many industries, including oil companies.

His party, which in December became the largest faction in the Duma, the lower house of parliament, has already set up a committee to review the “negative effects” of privatization.

The 13 entrepreneurs include heads of five private banks and two oil companies involved in a controversial “loans-for-shares” scheme last year in which favored banks, in return for cheap loans to the government, were allowed to acquire parts of state-owned companies with low bids in rigged auctions.

That program was suspended and Yeltsin’s privatization chief, Anatoly B. Chubais, was fired after the strong Communist showing in the parliamentary elections.

When Yeltsin revved up his reelection campaign in February, the same elite businessmen rallied to support it and put forward Chubais to help organize it.

Their latest declaration represents second thoughts about Yeltsin’s chances and their own partisan role in the fray.

A Western diplomat here who tracks business and politics said the bankers were stunned to find, while inspecting their newly acquired factories, that workers resent the terms of the privatization deals and are planning to vote overwhelmingly for Zyuganov.

The same diplomat said the businessmen might also be privy to a recent, unpublished Kremlin-sponsored poll showing Zyuganov ahead of Yeltsin, 30% to 10%, in the crowded presidential field.

Most voter surveys published this spring have portrayed Yeltsin as gaining on the front-running Communist and pulling even in recent days, with about 20% each.

After some collective rethinking, the millionaires issued their carefully balanced manifesto. They portrayed the election as a struggle between two deeply polarized camps, democratic and Communist, neither of which enjoys majority support or “the right to impose its truth on the entire society.”

“We understand the Communists and accept their political role as representing the interests of social groups that suffered in the course of complex and often erroneous reforms,” read the gravely worded manifesto.

But it also warned of “the serious danger . . . of ideological revenge” by Communists returning to power.

The manifesto comes amid growing assertions by pro-Yeltsin commentators that the president, who in 1991 became the first freely elected leader in a millennium of Russian history, might resort to vote fraud or force to cling to power if the electorate turns against him.

“In Russia, there is no culture, mechanism or mental acceptance of a transition of authority,” Sergei A. Zverev, deputy general director of Most Bank, whose chairman signed the manifesto, said.

“The idea proposed by the bankers may be outlined very simply,” wrote Vitaly Tretyakov, editor of the Moscow paper Nezavisimaya Gazeta: “Lock Yeltsin and Zyuganov in a room and not let them out until they reach an agreement not to make June 16 the first day of a civil war but the first day of collaboration . . . on a realistic reformation of the country.”