Pushing and shoving broke out in the Congress of Peoples' Deputies Thursday as lawmakers vented their frustation over the deadlocked session.
Dozens of hard-line and reformist legislators converged around the podium of the marble hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace, where the parliamentary session was being held, in a dispute over whether to hold secret balloting on constitutional amendments.Two or three deputies scuffled as plainclothes parliamentary security stepped in to restore order on the third day of the Congress - Russia's highest legislative body.
"Get away! Get away!" Congress speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov shouted into his microphone as the deputies tried to get control of the central lectern. "Protect me from these deputies!"
President Boris Yeltsin, who had been sitting at an elevated desk behind Khasbulatov, walked from the chamber in disgust.
Before the melee, hard-line lawmakers had bitterly attacked Yelt-sin, urging him to resign along with his "bankrupt government."
Legislator after legislator strode up to microphones in the Congress of People's Deputies to say Russia had become a land of crime, corruption and poverty under the reforms of Yeltsin and his acting prime minister, Yegor Gaidar.
"Our businessmen can only be compared to the international mafia," Deputy Aman Tuleyev of Kemerovo, Siberia, told the 1,041-member parliament. "Some people have millions, and other people have already started to pick through garbage dumps" to survive.
As the attacks flew, reformers and hard-liners worked on competing resolutions on the future of Russia's reforms. Neither side commands enough votes to prevail.