Blast Mars Run-Up to Russian Vote

A Kremlin compromise Tuesday to advance peace in Chechnya stirred hopes of victory for President Boris N. Yeltsin in Sunday’s election, but a deadly subway bombing here provoked fears that angry Chechen rebels may be trying to disrupt the vote by attacking Russian civilians.

The 9:10 p.m. explosion under a train seat as the train pulled into Tulskaya station, about three miles south of the Kremlin, killed four passengers and injured at least 12 others. Police blocked off the station and kept journalists and bystanders far from the smoky scene.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing. But Chechen separatists who have been under fire from federal troops since December 1994 have previously threatened terrorist actions against Russia and earlier planted radioactive and explosive devices in Moscow to prove their ability to make good on those threats.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Emergency Situations would say only that the cause of the blast was being investigated.

Security has been stepped up in Moscow as the election approaches, but the heavily traveled Metro that connects 150 stations and carries 7 million people a day is poorly guarded and virtually indefensible because of the vast area it covers.

The explosion was not the first act of violence in these tense last days of the campaign. Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov’s running mate, Valery Shantsev, was seriously injured by a car-bomb explosion outside his central Moscow apartment house Friday.

The subway deaths came as negotiations between the rebels and federal authorities had been producing new pledges to end the 18-month-old conflict.

The latest deal worked out at talks on the fringes of the Chechens’ devastated homeland seems unlikely to bring real peace any time soon, as Moscow’s puppet government in the southern region has angrily rejected it.

But it aided Yeltsin’s more immediate and modest need: to keep the sounds and sights of war, which has cost up to 30,000 lives, off Russian television screens for the rest of this week while people decide whether he or his main challenger, Communist Gennady A. Zyuganov, will get their votes.

After Yeltsin’s popularity plummeted to unprecedented lows in January following a Chechen hostage-taking attack in the southern Russian republic of Dagestan, the Kremlin leader embarked on a determined reelection bid that has bought back some supporters with lavish spending and promises of improved social services.

Offering voters at least the hope of peace in Chechnya would be the perfect climax to these efforts, and the deal worked out by Nationalities Minister Vyacheslav A. Mikhailov has the bonus of shielding Yeltsin from responsibility for any unrest that might break out in the republic at the time of the election.

Mikhailov gave in to the separatist negotiators by dropping Russia’s earlier insistence that local elections be held in Chechnya at the same time as the presidential poll. The local vote can be held later, he conceded, after Russian troops pull out and the rebels are disarmed.

The separatists had been worried that elections to the local parliament would legitimize the deputies of Doku Zavgayev, the proxy ruler whom Moscow installed in the Chechen capital, Grozny, last summer.

Zavgayev, Chechnya’s last Soviet-era Communist Party boss until he was unseated by the late separatist leader Dzhokar M. Dudayev in 1991, was reported to be furious over Tuesday’s agreement. The vote for the local governing council will go ahead anyway, Zavgayev told Russia’s Interfax news agency.

Zavgayev, aware he is losing Moscow’s favor as the search for peace intensifies, also has been rebuffed by the Kremlin in his demand that a mediator from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe be ejected from the peace talks for what Zavgayev alleges has been bias toward the rebels.