RUSSIA'S State Duma, or lower house of parliament, stirred up a row with the Kremlin yesterday by denouncing moves that buried the former Soviet Union in 1991. A Duma vote declared null and void a 1991 Russian parliament decision that ratified moves to replace the Soviet Union with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
President Yeltsin, in his first major confrontation with the communist dominated legislature since it was elected in December, accused his political opponents of trying to block the June 16th presidential election.
Deputies also voted to recognise the validity of a March 17th, 1991 referendum which showed a majority of people in favour of preserving the Soviet Union.
The resolution, which is unlikely to have any practical consequences, has alarmed ex Soviet neighbours. The CIS now groups all ex Soviet republics except for three Baltic states.
The vote effectively denounced the so called Belovezhsk pact, signed by Mr Yeltsin and the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine.
Mr Yeltsin described the resolution, backed by the powerful Communist Party and its allies, as "scandalous" and said: "They are trying to stop the election."
Presidents of many CIS states indignantly defended their sovereignty and said the vote was potentially dangerous. "This decision is a real threat not only to neighbouring countries once part of the Soviet Union and for the world community as a whole," the Ukrainian President, Mr Leonid Kuchma, said.
Mr Yeltsin took steps to calm the neighbours. "We have summoned the ambassadors from the Commonwealth states and asked them to onpass to their leaders that it [the resolution] is nonsense and nothing will come out of it," Itar Tass news agency quoted him as saying.
Mr Yeltsin is trailing the Communist leader, Mr Gennady Zyuganov, in opinion polls.
The former Soviet president, Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, who bitterly criticised the Belovezh pact in the past, said the country be once had led could be revived. I am the one who is expected to applaud to this because my presidential post would become real again, he told Interfax.
"But to talk about the revival to the Soviet Union now that the fate of the state had been decided, means to ignore the new realities."