4 Injured as Car Bomb in Red Square Rattles Kremlin

A gunman associated with extreme Russian nationalist causes drove a car into Red Square, aimed it at the main Kremlin gate and leaped out just before the vehicle exploded Wednesday night, wounding himself and three guards in a terrorist attack on Russia’s seat of political power.

The car bomb rattled windows inside the centuries-old fortress with a blast that police equated with 13 pounds of dynamite but that caused no structural damage. President Boris N. Yeltsin, who presides over Russia from a Kremlin office, was 850 miles away at a Black Sea resort on medical leave.

Police arrested the driver, identified as Ivan V. Orlov, confiscated a pistol and disarmed what they called a second, more powerful explosive device in the car. Orlov, 65, was treated for superficial wounds and charged by the Moscow prosecutor’s office with terrorism.

One member of Yeltsin’s presidential regiment was seriously injured and two other Kremlin guards also suffered wounds in the 7 p.m. blast, which engulfed the cheap yellow Russian-made Moskvich car in smoke and flames about 20 yards from the Kremlin’s closed Spassky Gate.

“There was a big bang and then a green light, like a rocket,” said Dmitri Puchkov, 24, who was walking along the opposite side of Red Square on a misty evening. “There were flames and then a lot of smoke.”

Acts of political terror have been rare in Moscow since the end of Yeltsin’s war against ethnic separatists in Chechnya more than two years ago. Wednesday’s attack came at one of the tensest times of his 7-year-old presidency, with the economy and Yeltsin both invalids. Extremist outbursts by Russian chauvinists against Jews and other minorities have been growing.

Orlov is an ultranationalist writer accredited as a correspondent of Russkaya Pravda, an anti-Semitic tabloid that has published just 17 issues for a readership of less than 5,000 since its founding in 1994.

He has written two books: “In the Land of Yeltsin” and “Russia Is Suffering Because of Its Leaders.” In the early 1990s, he joined Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky’s ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party and sold its pamphlets in the lobby of parliament. Later he quit the party and drifted toward the Communists without joining their ranks.

Alexander M. Aratov, editor of the tabloid, described Orlov as an impulsive, vitriolic crusader as well as a disturbed pensioner recently evicted from his apartment in a dreary industrial suburb of Moscow who was going through his second divorce.

“He is resolute, adamant and capable of radical action,” the editor said. “I think that by this act, Ivan Orlov tried to express his civic position--a position of a man who loves his country but hates its leaders.”

Yeltsin is hated by hard-line Russian nationalists, who include rightists as well as more influential Communists, because he helped break up the Soviet Union and bring Russia closer to the West. They also exaggerate the influence of Jews who have served as Cabinet ministers.

The car bombing occurred hours after the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, rejected a motion to censure a speech by one of its members, Albert Makashov, calling for a systematic elimination of Jews from Russia. Some human rights activists here asserted that the two events were more than coincidence.

“This [bombing] was carefully masterminded--an act aimed at finding out how far the fascists can go in Russia,” said Pyotr Kaznacheyev, leader of the country’s Youth Anti-Fascist Action movement.

Orlov’s car bomb was perhaps the most spectacular intrusion in Red Square since May 28, 1987, when 19-year-old West German Mathias Rust embarrassed the Soviet military by flying a light plane from Helsinki, the Finnish capital, and landing on the square’s vast brick expanse.

According to police, witnesses and Russian media accounts, Orlov speeded down Ilyinka Street past the GUM department store, crashed through a metal barrier that closes Red Square to traffic and headed for the gate at the foot of Spassky Tower, a large red clock tower that is one of Russia’s most distinctive symbols.

A police car managed to cut him off and forced him to stop just short of the gate. At that point, according to Russia’s independent NTV station, Orlov got out, turned a pistol on himself and pulled the trigger. Police said it was a gas pistol adapted to shoot 9-millimeter bullets but apparently wasn’t loaded.

Seconds later the car exploded, sending plumes of smoke rising above the multicolored onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral.

“It seemed like fireworks,” said Alexei Kukharenko, 18, who was walking with friends about half a mile away. “We were trying to figure out what holiday it was.”

Police said that damage to Spassky Gate, the Kremlin’s main staff entrance, would have been greater had the second, timed device gone off but added that the car could not have penetrated the metal gate.

Hundreds of police cleared Red Square until the blackened car was towed away three hours later.

Times staff writer Maura Reynolds and Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.