About 4,000 opponents of President Boris Yeltsin demonstrated Saturday outside the Russian parliament building to mark the second anniversary of an attempt to restore Communist-style rule.
The protesters waved red Soviet and Czarist flags as speakers accused Yeltsin and his administration of destroying the former Soviet Union and Russia. They demanded that the president step down.Both Communist sympathizers and Russian nationalists oppose Yeltsin's efforts to bring Western-style capitalism. The attempted coup helped bring down the Kremlin and raise Yeltsin's image as a defender of democracy as he led opposition to the insurrection.
The protesters later marched to Lubyanka Square to mourn the failure of the August 1991 putsch outside the headquarters of the former KGB, the Soviet secret police.
The rally, organized by a coalition of opposition movements called the National Salvation Front, was the second in two days.
On Friday, several thousand hard-liners and an equally large crowd of Yeltsin supporters faced off outside the parliament building - the site where Yeltsin stood on a tank in 1991 in resistance to the attempted coup.
Yeltsin supporters and government officials gathered on Saturday at Moscow's Vagankovo cemetery, bringing wreaths and placing candles at the graves of three young men killed during the putsch.
The coup anniversary came as political fighting between Yeltsin and his legislative opponents intensified in Russia.
Yeltsin asked the lawmakers Friday to call early elections, a proposal quickly rejected by parliament speaker Ruslan Khas-bu-la-tov as "aggressive and confrontational." Legislative terms are due to expire in 1995.
Yeltsin's foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, added his own voice to the call for new elections, saying Saturday that lawmakers "lack courage, convictions and political experience."