President Boris Yeltsin sought to reassure Russia's worried neighbors Saturday after the Communist-led parliament voted to restore the Soviet Union.
Yeltsin ordered the Foreign Ministry to notify nations that the resolution, approved Friday, has no legal standing and does not alter Russia's commitment to its international obligations.He also warned the lower house, or Duma, that it had called its own legitimacy into doubt as well as "the possibility of holding presidential elections."
Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov is Yeltsin's main opponent in the June 16 presidential election.
"I will allow no attempts to undermine Russia's statehood and destabilize the country," Yeltsin said in an unusually detailed statement.
Reaction continued to pour in from the former Soviet republics, where the resolution was deplored as a crude Communist election ploy.
"An act of provocation," said Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosian. "Preposterous and anachronistic," said his neighbor, Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, a former Soviet foreign minister.
"It gives you the shivers," Latvian Foreign Minister Valdis Birkavs said, according to the Interfax news agency. "It is a sign of what might happen if the Communists win the presidential election."
Yeltsin was a key figure in the events that hastened the Soviet Union's demise, and the Communists have long condemned him for it.
The Duma resolution, passed on a 250-98 vote with heavy support from nationalists, rejected as illegal the December 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union into 15 separate nations.
In language straight out of the Soviet lexicon, speaker Gennady Seleznyov said the Duma is giving Yeltsin a chance to "start the process of his political rehabilitation."
Seleznyov, a Communist, said the measure expresses popular sentiment.