
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 27, 1993                   TAG: 9303270101
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: MOSCOW                                LENGTH: Medium

BID TO OUST YELTSIN FAILS

After a week of searing political tension that focused a nervous world's gaze on Moscow, the right-wing drive to oust Boris Yeltsin fizzled in Parliament Friday, and Russia's president and the head of its highest court both said citizens need to have the final say.

"It is too early to declare victory, but it is already time to say that the idea of impeachment is dead," Sergei B. Stankevich, a Yeltsin adviser, said as the first day of the Congress of People's Deputies drew to an end.

Even die-hard Yeltsin opponents admitted that they could not muster the necessary two-thirds majority, 689 votes, as the 1,033-member Parliament assembled in great suspense for its emergency session inside the Kremlin. At the most, anti-Yeltsin deputies forecast after doing some head-counting, they had 600 votes.

So Yeltsin opponents from the Russian Unity bloc endorsed Constitutional Court Chairman Valery Zorkin's unexpected compromise proposal for early presidential and parliament elections this autumn, a contest that they think Yeltsin will lose.

No formal deal was cut by the end of the day, however. Renewed attacks on Russia's first president, and probably a formal vote attempting to oust him, can be expected when Parliament reconvenes this morning.

But the pressure on Yeltsin seemed to be off for the first time in a week. The Russian foreign ministry said that, as planned, Yeltsin will attend the April 3-4 summit in Vancouver, British Columbia, with President Clinton.

Returning to the chamber that he had stormed out of two weeks earlier, vowing never to return, Yeltsin again insisted to the Congress that he has the right as president to hold a referendum to prove that he still has public support for himself and for a new constitution he favors that would give Russia a presidential system of government.

"I have made my choice by entrusting my fate to the fairest judge, the people," Yeltsin said from the congress rostrum.

It was the 62-year-old head of state's stubborn insistence on holding the April 25 vote and his announcement last Saturday that he was proclaiming "special rule" that accelerated the gravest political crisis here since the August 1991 putsch - one some Russians said could spark civil war.

Yeltsin had made it clear that he would ignore any vote to remove him from office.

Second thoughts about the consequences were what made some advocates of ousting Yeltsin recoil when the time to act arrived in the congress.

"If impeachment is announced, the country will split, the power structures will split," said Viktor V. Aksyuchits, a leading opponent. "At the same time, I believe he earned impeachment long ago."

Yeltsin ally Dimitri A. Volkogonov reminded deputies that the political warfare could ultimately drag in the Russian Army and its state-of-the-art weaponry, "causing a national tragedy in a nuclear country."

In an interview to the Interfax news agency at the close of the session, Yeltsin's chief tormentor, Parliament chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov, said he, too, would not vote for Yeltsin's removal from office.

Since the wily Khasbulatov manipulates the chamber like a virtuoso, the issue may now never even reach a vote.

by CNB