Yeltsin returns for talks on power-sharing

Amid warnings that Russia risks splintering like the Soviet Union, President Boris Yeltsin yesterday called for an urgent session of the country's supreme legislature, the Congress of People's Deputies, to break a crippling deadlock over the division of power.

Mr Yeltsin, back in Moscow only a day after announcing a 12- day holiday in the countryside, suggested the emergency session during talks in the Kremlin with his conservative rival, Ruslan Khasbulatov.

Mr Khasbulatov is chairman of both the Congress, which normally meets only once every six months, as well as the smaller standing legislature, the Supreme Soviet. The Congress, which has more than 1,000 members, all of them elected under Communism, last met in December.

A statement from Mr Yeltsin's press office said an extraordinary session was needed to ratify constitutional provisions fixing a clear division of power between the legislature and the presidency. It said the session could take place during the first 10 days of March.

Whether the Congress meets, though, hinges on whether Mr Yeltsin and Mr Khasbulatov can reach some sort of constitutional settlement themselves first. The Congress will be asked to approve, rather than reach, a power- sharing accord.

In the first sign of real progress towards ending their quarrel, they agreed yesterday to form a special commission to delineate the powers of the president and parliament by the end of next week.

Where ultimate power should lie is the great unresolved issue at the core of Russia's post-Communist order, creating deep political uncertainty at a time of wrenching economic change. Despite the Soviet Union's collapse, Russia is still governed under a revised version of a constitution introduced by Leonid Brezhnev in 1977.

Mr Khasbulatov, speaking to Richard Nixon, the former US president, shortly before his meeting with President Yeltsin, said Russia faced the danger of a new dictatorship and insisted that only parliament could provide an effective bulwark for democracy.

The dispute between Mr Yeltsin and Mr Khasbulatov, tinged by different views on economic policy but rooted in the question of power, has led to fears that Russia, like the Soviet Union in the last year of Mikhail Gorbachev, is slipping towards disintegration. Yesterday's meeting, which lasted only 20 minutes, was their second round of face-to-face bargaining.

Just as paralysis at the centre in the last year of the Soviet Union fuelled demands for ever-greater autonomy by Soviet republics, the feuding between Mr Yeltsin and Mr Khasbulatov could fragment Russia, itself a patchwork of 16 autonomous republics and five autonomous regions.

In an effort to hold such forces in check, the Prime Minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, met regional leaders in the Siberian city of Tomsk yesterday and warned against the perils of a weak centre. 'To a certain extent the process that led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union is taking place in Russia,' he told the Siberian Assembly. 'There will be no strong Russia if the regions are strong . . . we do not need strong regions.'

Mr Yeltsin and Mr Khasbulatov clashed over the same issue of power-sharing at the last session of the Congress of People's Deputies in December, which forced the President to dump his candidate for prime minister, Yegor Gaidar. After talks refereed by the Constitutional Court, they reached an accord on a constitution to replace the old Soviet one.

The agreement, though, quickly dissolved as Mr Khasbulatov stepped up attacks on President Yeltsin and parliament moved to assert its conservative voice in the formulation of both economic and foreign policy.

After championing the referendum as the only way out of Russia's constitutional crisis, Mr Yeltsin last week backed away from the plan under pressure from regional leaders, conservative legislators and even some of his own supporters. Yesterday, another Yeltsin ally, the mayor of St Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, also challenged the wisdom of holding a referendum. 'The situation is developing so that a referendum simply cannot be held now. It has not been prepared. Russians don't know what question will be put to a vote.'

With politicians unable to agree on what issue should be put to voters, beyond a list of 11 questions of complex constitutional law, the public has shown little enthusiasm for the referendum, still officially scheduled for 11 April. An opinion poll published this week showed that only one in three Moscow residents will definitely vote.