Sorry State of Siege

By John Kohan/Moscow

They marched in the crisp gold sunlight of a perfect autumn afternoon. Some 10,000 strong, they chanted "Soviet Union, Soviet Union," "Yeltsin is Dead," as they braved a hail of rubber bullets and tear gas from troops loyal to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Breaching police lines, the demonstrators recaptured the plaza behind the barricaded White House, where 100 or so deputies of the disbanded Russian Parliament, along with their aides and security men remained in defiance of Yeltsin. Former Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, a brief case held protectively before his chest, addressed the mob in fiery language, commanding them to "stand up, take positions . . . and attack." With that, the tense stand-off that has paralyzed Russia for nearly two weeks teetered into total chaos.

Overwhelming troops from the Interior Ministry, the demonstrators grabbed shields and guns from their opponents, commandeered several military vehicles, and swarmed south to the mammoth high rise that houses Moscow's mayor. Within an hour, the mob had seized control of the building. They then moved on to Ostenkino, the national television broadcasting center and seized it without any apparent resistance from pro-Yeltsin troops.

By nightfall, forces loyal to Yeltsin finally began to muster their response. Yeltsin, who had left Moscow for an afternoon in the country, rushed back by helicopter to personally direct the counter offensive declaring a state of emergency. However, troops inexplicably refused to maintain their defenses by force.

In Washington a worried President Clinton was briefed on the chaotic situation in Moscow. "It is clear that the violence was perpetrated by the Rutskoi-Khasbulatov forces. President Yeltsin has bent over backwards to avoid excessive force and I still am convinced that the United States must support him and the process of bringing about free and fair elections."

Earlier in the week, a dozen defenders of the White House peered out over a makeshift barricade of cobblestones and scrap metal, welcoming visitors to "the First Boris Yeltsin Concentration Camp." Striving to be heard above the din, Vladimir Chernov, one of the Deputies holed up in the White House, stepped to the edge of the cordon to shout out the latest news from inside. He dismissed any talk of compromise. "How can you trust them?" he asked. "They have made these young boys take up arms against their own people."

In the streets, the pushing and shoving between government troops and supporters of the parliamentary holdouts grew rougher. Flak-jacketed riot police lashed out at protesters, swinging truncheons and body-size shields as they charged stocky babushkas, or grandmothers, who yelled "Shame!" at the rows of Yeltsin forces. "If you were my sons," shrieked a hysterical woman, "I would strangle you with my bare hands, you traitors!"

As the political crisis dragged into its second week, one thing was clear: Yeltsin was facing the crisis of his life. If the President thought his hard- line enemies in the legislature could be easily pushed aside after he issued his decree dissolving the parliament, he was mistaken. The Kremlin enticed some parliamentarians out with promises of new jobs, then sealed the building off with police lines, water trucks, and razor-sharp coils of barbed wire. But the hard core of Deputies remaining loyal to Rutskoi and Khasbulatov simply refused to budge.

Only the mediation efforts of Patriarch Alexiy II, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who offered his services last week as a go-between, brought some hope for ending the impasse. After two days of tough negotiations at Moscow's Danilovsky Monastery, representatives from the Kremlin and the White House agreed last Saturday to work out a step-by-step plan for a joint reduction of weapons and guards at the parliament over a two-day period. They also discussed the issue of "safety guarantees" for the defenders of the White House. One key obstacle remained: any accord would have to be approved by parliament, which rejected an earlier peace plan. As Deputy Mikhail Chelnokov put it, "The most important question to be discussed is not weapons but Yeltsin's coup d'etat."

It was certainly possible that if the Deputies turned down the latest disarmament deal, the Kremlin might feel forced to launch an assault on the White House, but a bloody outcome could rebound against Yeltsin, shifting Russian sympathies toward the martyred Deputies. He also has his international image to think about. As the deadlock continued, Western governments grew nervous about what his next move might be: they have swallowed Yel-tsin's violations of the constitution so far, but any violence could scare democratic governments away. After Washington expressed concern about possible violations of "human rights" last week, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev felt obliged to state once again that "there was no intention and is no intention to use force."

The danger for Yeltsin is that his hold on power would be eroded the longer the siege goes on. He is already struggling to keep the conflict from spreading into Russia's 88 republics and regions, as Khasbulatov claimed that "dictator Yeltsin does not control the country outside of Moscow." The President's strength is shakier among the regional legislatures dominated by former Soviet apparatchiks who share parliament's distaste for radical reform. In a warning signal of troubles to come, lawmakers in Siberia vowed to set up their own republic, withhold tax revenues and even disrupt the Trans-Siberian Railroad if Yeltsin did not end the White House blockade. Conservative legislators from 60 republics and regions gathered in Moscow's Constitutional Court building to condemn the President's decrees. These politicians, eager to stake out their own authority beyond Moscow's weakened government, have demanded that Yeltsin grant them a major role in organizing elections and rewriting the constitution.

Presidential adviser Sergei Filatov insisted that Yeltsin still commanded popular support in the provinces as well as the allegiance of regional administrators he appointed. But the President was taking no chances last week as he dispatched Kremlin envoys from the Urals to the Pacific coast for eight separate meetings with regional leaders. Yeltsin may need his supporters in the hinterlands to contain the political damage caused by the siege at the White House. He has summoned his Federation Council, a consulting group of provincial leaders, to meet next week, and could use the forum as a kind of interim parliament.

Yeltsin got plenty of advice about how to end the conflict from centrist political parties and Russian Constitutional Court chairman Valeri Zorkin. All the compromises hinged on holding simultaneous elections for both the parliament and the presidency -- the so-called zero option that Yeltsin has long opposed and roundly dismissed as "extremely dangerous." He believes the President ought to remain in office during the legislative vote to prevent a power vacuum from forming, and then stand for election later. Yeltsin has to be seen as winning his point about holding an early vote for a new parliament or the whole exercise in suspending the legislature will appear to have been a farce.

As the crisis lurched toward some undefined denouement last week, Yeltsin could still claim the upper hand. He appeared to have the army and the security services under firm control. Public opinion remained on his side, in no small measure because of heavily slanted press reports. Even as angry supporters of the parliament, numbering in the thousands, staged nightly street clashes with riot police, most Muscovites continued to watch events from the sidelines, swearing at the massive traffic jams that snarled center- city boulevards. Yeltsin had to ask himself how long he could let the standoff continue before ordinary Russians began to doubt the wisdom of his power play and lambaste him for being too weak or question his commitment to democratic reforms. It all came down to a far from simple question: Were all hopes of compromise now dead?