The protracted struggle for power in Russia hurtled toward a dangerous endgame Saturday after President Boris Yeltsin seized special powers to rule by decree in a daring attempt to circumvent his foes in the parliament.
The vice president, legislative leaders and the chairman of the Constitutional Court immediately gathered at the Russian parliament to denounce the power grab as unconstitutional. Some legislators threatened to launch impeachment procedures against the president as early as Sunday.
Both sides said a compromise was out of the question, and the showdown seemed likely, for better or worse, to break the long deadlock over the future of the nation’s economic and political reforms. Some prominent leaders, including Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, warned that the conflict could lead to violence and bloodshed.
In Washington, President Clinton said that Yeltsin “has our support” and that he was still expecting to meet with him at a summit in Vancouver that is to begin April 3.
In a nationally televised address, Yeltsin announced he would defy the legislature and go ahead with an April 25 referendum to ask Russia’s citizens to decide who should rule the country, the president or the parliament.
Looking oddly distracted even as he announced his decisive measures, Yeltsin declared he also would ask his countrymen to approve a new constitution that would dissolve the Congress of People’s Deputies, Russia’s all-powerful supreme legislature, and call new elections for a conventional, Western-style parliament.
And in the remaining time leading up to the referendum, Yeltsin vowed, he will effectively rule by decree to accelerate the country’s economic reforms. He said he would ignore any acts of parliament-or rulings by the Constitutional Court-that he believes violate his presidential powers.
Yeltsin said the Constitutional Court, which would play a key role in any impeachment attempt, could not be trusted to act as an impartial arbiter.
“Citizens of Russia, I say openly that I am resolved on decisive action,” Yeltsin said. “If we do not stop this political turmoil . . . if we do not give a powerful impulse to economic reforms, the country will be plunged into anarchy.”
Yeltsin’s arch political foe, parliament Speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov, was traveling in the Commonwealth of Independent States on Saturday night and was reported rushing back to Moscow. A source close to Yeltsin said the president had taken advantage of Khasbulatov’s absence from Moscow to plan his thrust against the legislature.
Condemnation of Yeltsin’s action came within 90 minutes of his speech.
“The Constitutional Court states that this is an attempt at a state coup,” court chairman Valery Zorkin said. “The court convened this evening and decided that (Yeltsin’s decrees) don’t have judicial power and are not valid.”
Russia’s standing legislature, the Supreme Soviet, was due to convene in emergency session Sunday afternoon to begin considering the question. It could decide to summon deputies of its parent body, the Congress of People’s Deputies, from their districts across the country for a special session to begin impeachment proceedings.
According to one controversial constitutional amendment approved by the Congress earlier this month, Yeltsin immediately forfeits his powers if the legislature determines he has violated the constitution.
The Congress, if it chooses, can submit articles of impeachment to the Constitutional Court, which has issued several strong rulings against Yeltsin in the last year. If the court ratifies the articles, they are then sent back to the Congress for a formal impeachment vote.
“This evening begins the political suicide of Boris Yeltsin,” said ultranationalist deputy Sergei Baburin, a leading Yeltsin foe. “He violated at least 18 articles of the constitution tonight.”
Yeltsin was careful to stress that he was not dissolving the legislature, saying it could continue meeting-although without power to override his decrees or interfere with the April referendum.
But if lawmakers move to impeach him, Yeltsin may have to take more definitive action against them.
“It’s too late for Yeltsin to back down now,” liberal political analyst Alexei Kiva said. “So he must have a fallback strategy. He must be prepared to take even stronger measures after the opposite side reacts.”
Despite the formidable lineup of public officials opposing him, Yeltsin still has some strong cards to play. Throughout Russian and Soviet history, legal technicalities rarely have determined how power struggles like this one are resolved.
The ability to mobilize popular support and control a few key levers of power often have been the pivotal factors. And opinion polls consistently have shown that Yeltsin enjoys much greater support among the people than the legislature-although the polls also show that his support has declined as the Russian economic situation has worsened.
In his speech Saturday night, Yeltsin announced measures designed to bolster that support. He said he was speeding up the privatization of land and would take steps to compensate the millions of citizens whose bank savings evaporated because of inflation that topped 2,000 percent last year.
He said he had ordered Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin to come up with specific plans to implement these decisions in the next two days.
“I am proposing a way out of the crisis that is civilized . . . without extreme or arbitrary measures, without tanks or barricades, without street rallies or strikes,” the president said. “You yourselves, the citizens of Russia, will decide everything by your vote.”
The outcome of the power struggle could depend on whether either side manages to bring its supporters into the streets of Moscow. The mayor of Moscow and many city officials are strong supporters of Yeltsin and they know that if he is forced from power, their positions would be in grave jeopardy.
In addition, Yeltsin has much greater access to state-owned television operations and for the present at least he can count on the support of most electronic and print journalists.
There were no immediate signs of unrest in Moscow or elsewhere in the country early Sunday, although a handful of hard-line Communists gathered to denounce Yeltsin outside the Russian parliament-the same place where Yeltsin himself rallied democrats in August 1991 to oppose the hard-line coup attempt against former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
But the ominous appeals to the nation by Vice President Rutskoi and Russian Prosecutor General Valentin Stepankov to avoid public demonstrations and bloodshed underscored fears that Yeltsin, by his dramatic action, now has triggered a dangerous spiral that could lead to civil confrontations.
“This order will lead to a split in state and society,” Rutskoi said he wrote to Yeltsin in a letter before the president’s speech. “Major disputes will start in society, which will be followed by the use of force, and blood.”
Rutskoi said he refused to sign Yeltsin’s order.
How the Russian army, Interior Ministry troops or the KGB’s special forces might react if called upon to support either the president or the parliament was not clear.
Yeltsin specifically stressed in his speech that he had not summoned the army from its barracks. But Yuri Voronin, acting chairman of the parliament in Khasbulatov’s absence, said at a news conference that parliament deputies were barred by Kremlin guards from entering the Kremlin on Saturday, raising the possibility that Yeltsin might try forcibly to block an emergency session of the Congress.
Defense Ministry officials have repeated that the army-burned once when it backed the early stages of the 1991 coup attempt-would refrain from taking sides in the current power dispute.
Voronin said he had spoken with Minister of Defense Pavel Grachev and Minister of Security Viktor Barannikov and both men had assured him they would “support the constitution.”
But it was not clear what precisely that allegiance would mean if the Congress and the Constitutional Court were to impeach Yeltsin, or if he tried to outlaw the legislature.
Both Yeltsin and his legislative opponents cloak themselves in various provisions of Russia’s Brezhnev-era Constitution to legitimize their positions. The 1978 document, never intended as the foundation of a truly democratic society, has been amended by the legislature more than 300 times in the past year.
Yeltsin, elected in 1991 in the first popular presidential ballot Russia had ever known, insists that an amendment to the constitution that created the office of the presidency gives him supreme powers.
The Congress of People’s Deputies, elected in 1990 and dominated by conservatives and Communists who oppose Yeltsin’s shock-therapy economic reforms, maintains that the constitution makes it the highest authority.
Yeltsin, who had suffered repeated humiliations at the past two Congress sessions as the deputies consistently voted to claw back his powers, now clearly has decided that his only hope to retain authority is a direct appeal to the Russian people, over the heads of the legislature and the Constitutional Court.
But whether he can prevail-whether he can guarantee that leaders in all of Russia’s far-flung and restive regions will even conduct the referendum-remains in doubt.
One industrialist who met with Yeltsin last week said he was told that Interior Ministry officials were collecting dossiers on legislators involved in criminal behavior, in preparation for a possible wave of anti-corruption arrests targeting the lawmakers and major gang figures.
Crime has increased sharply across the country, and a crackdown on violence and other illegal activity would be very popular.
Many radical democrats had been urging Yeltsin for more than a week to take firm action against the legislature. But even some of his staunchest supporters visibly blanched at his outright power seizure Saturday.
“This is just a pitiful turn of events,” said deputy Anatoly Shabad, a member of the Radical Democratic Party. “It is pitiful that Yeltsin found there was no other way to protect democracy than by taking unconstitutional steps. But although we didn’t call on Yeltsin to do this, now that he has done it, we will support him.”
