Parliament Leader Backs Yeltsin in Crisis

MOSCOW —  The chairman of Russia’s upper house of parliament rallied behind President Boris N. Yeltsin and Prime Minister Sergei V. Kiriyenko on Saturday, dismissing calls for them to resign over the country’s financial crisis.

“I think it would be premature to remove the government,” Yegor S. Stroyev told Interfax news agency one day after the Duma, or lower house, criticized Kiriyenko and adopted a resolution urging Yeltsin to quit.

Stroyev defended Yeltsin, as he has done regularly since becoming upper house chairman more than two years ago, and called for cooperation to take the place of confrontation.

“We’ve had enough state coups,” he said. “We must learn to reach constructive agreements.”

The opposition-dominated Duma slammed the 4-month-old government Friday at a special session about the crisis. It particularly attacked last week’s de facto devaluation of the ruble and what many analysts said amounted to a debt default.

The Federation Council, as the upper house is known, holds its own special session on the crisis Friday. It is made up of regional leaders and so gives Russia’s 89 regions a chance to express their views of the economic problems.

Russian newspapers said trust in Yeltsin is at a new low after months of crisis in which shares have sunk and treasury bill yields--the return investors demand for lending money to the government--soared. Treasury bill debts are now to be restructured.

“It is hard to imagine a more unpleasant political situation in Moscow for the president following yesterday’s Duma session,” the liberal Nezavisimaya Gazeta said.

“The confrontation line between the president and parliament brings to mind the start of the autumn of 1993, but now the president’s position is in some ways weaker.”

Yeltsin faced a standoff with hard-liners in parliament in 1993, which he resolved by using tanks. Yeltsin had much more public support then than he has now.

Because of the fall in his support, there was a hollow ring to a written statement issued by Yeltsin on Saturday to mark the anniversary of the failed coup against Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1991.

Despite his opposition to Gorbachev, Yeltsin helped rally people against the coup plotters, and the anniversary of the failure of the coup is now celebrated.

“Under this flag we united seven years ago in a striving for changes, renewal and truth,” Yeltsin said in his statement.

Even those who gathered in central Moscow to commemorate what they call a victory of democracy said Yeltsin’s absence hurt their feelings. Yeltsin has been vacationing for most of the past month and has rarely appeared in public.

“The president should have been with us today, but no one showed up,” one demonstrator told Russian television.