Russian Parliament Fails in Bid to Impeach Yeltsin

Apparently afraid of bringing more chaos to their troubled country, Russian lawmakers handed a new victory to President Boris N. Yeltsin on Saturday and failed to pass any of five articles of impeachment against him.

The outcome avoided a constitutional crisis and proved once again that despite his frailties, Yeltsin is Russia’s dominant--and perhaps indomitable--political leader.

“The vote today shows that Yeltsin can do whatever he wants with the country and get away with it,” said Vladimir P. Gromov, a member of the Communist Party faction that launched the impeachment drive a year ago. “He can feel secure because even [parliament] can’t touch him.”

But the vote in parliament’s lower house, the Duma, was hardly a rousing endorsement of the president. Few deputies cast ballots in defense of Yeltsin--in fact, more than one-quarter skipped the vote altogether, choosing to abstain or be absent.

“There is no reason to rejoice or feel victorious,” said Vladimir A. Ryzhkov, head of the pro-government Our Home Is Russia faction, which voted against impeachment. “Russia is in dire condition. Our faction appeals to our colleagues . . . to think about what we can do starting Monday to revive the country.”

Outside the lower house, hundreds of protesters milled about with Soviet-style flags, chanting “Depose Yeltsin!” before the vote and “Shame on you!” afterward. But some pro-Yeltsin demonstrators cheered the outcome.

For his part, Yeltsin stayed out of sight at his country residence, leaving only to make a quick trip to the hospital for a medical checkup that his aides described as routine. They hailed the vote as a triumph for moderation.

“The extremely grave political crisis we faced has been prevented,” said Yeltsin’s prime minister-designate, Sergei V. Stepashin. “Reason has prevailed.”

It was an impressive turnaround for Yeltsin, who just a few days earlier appeared to have galvanized his opposition by firing his popular prime minister, Yevgeny M. Primakov. At that time, faction leaders predicted that 400 of the 450 members of the Duma would vote to impeach Yeltsin on at least one of the charges, that of illegally waging war on the separatist republic of Chechnya.

In the end, that charge got only 283 votes--17 short of the 300 needed to pass. More than a hundred deputies didn’t even vote.

“They were frightened and didn’t dare to vote the way their leaders boasted they would,” said Andrei A. Piontkovsky, director of the Institute for Political Studies. “The Duma and the Communists are humiliated losers, and Yeltsin has made one of his many tremendous comebacks.”

With the impeachment having fizzled, some deputies said it is now more likely that the Duma will accept Stepashin as prime minister, completing Yeltsin’s victory. Until Saturday, the president and lawmakers appeared to be on a collision course over the nomination of the interior minister to succeed Primakov.

“[Yeltsin’s] position is very solid now,” Piontkovsky said. “He got rid of Primakov, whom he hated. He got rid of the impeachment. He will most certainly have a loyal premier. He is on top of things again, and his lack of popularity is of no concern to him.”

The impeachment vote was an important--if inconclusive--test of Russia’s nascent democracy.

On one hand, the Duma followed the constitution, trying to oust the president through the political process. And Yeltsin, although clearly peeved at the challenge to his authority, let the process take its course.

“Today, we proved that the impeachment procedure is a serious one. And future leaders, as well as the current ones, will understand clearly that sooner or later they will have to account for their actions,” said Grigory A. Yavlinsky, head of the liberal Yabloko bloc in the chamber. “If it’s only 17 votes that Russia’s democracy lacks, then it’s not doing too badly.”

Other deputies insisted that the outcome bodes ill for democracy in Russia, saying Yeltsin has accumulated so much power that the legislative branch can be intimidated even when it is dominated by Communists and other Yeltsin foes.

“Some deputies are not trying to serve Russia but to serve the president, who can turn around at any time and snarl at them,” said Vladimir V. Semago of the centrist Russia’s Regions faction, which split in the vote. “That’s their main concern.”

Yeltsin faced five counts of impeachment: causing the collapse of the Soviet Union, calling out tanks against the parliament in 1993, waging war against Chechnya, ruining the armed forces and causing deep economic hardship that amounts to genocide against the Russian people. The vote followed three days of high-octane speeches in which liberals and hard-liners dueled over questions of history and culpability. These debates generated odd alliances, with ideological opposites disagreeing over interpretations of history but taking similar positions on whether Yeltsin should be held accountable.

While Communists and their hard-line allies the Agrarians were strongly in favor of impeachment, the ultranationalist party of Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky was among Yeltsin’s loudest supporters, arguing that the Communists themselves were a major cause of the Soviet collapse. Among centrists and liberals, the Our Home Is Russia faction voted against impeachment, while the liberal Yabloko bloc voted in favor on the Chechnya charge.

Those who opposed impeachment argued that a vote for it was a vote for instability.

“I am sure that quite a few people who toyed with the idea of voting for the impeachment changed their mind at the very last minute and voted against it,” independent legislator Sergei N. Yushenkov said. “If any of the five charges received 300 votes, then the further development of the country’s economic, social and political life would have been in question.”

Ryzhkov made clear that even those who voted against impeachment do not necessarily support Yeltsin’s leadership. Before the vote, Ryzhkov--whose Our Home Is Russia party was founded in 1996 to support Yeltsin--delivered one of the harshest indictments of his presidency.

“In 1991, when he had the support of 97% of the population, he did not use the historic opportunity to create a truly democratic and stable state with a genuinely responsible parliament, with genuine separation of powers, with genuine and responsible parties, with a genuine market economy,” Ryzhkov said.

“In December 1993, when . . . he could write any constitution he wanted, he wrote the ugliest constitution in the world that gave rise to a politically irresponsible parliament, a politically helpless government and a president who is a colossus on feet of clay.”

But those were not the charges the Communist and hard-line majority brought forward, and they failed to consolidate the opposition to Yeltsin.

“Is it absolutely necessary to impeach the president in order to prove that the system of checks and balances works properly?” asked Yushenkov, the independent. “In all of U.S. history, impeachment only took place once in 200 years, but this does not mean there is no democracy in the United States. Impeachment is not a criterion for measuring democracy.”

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Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.