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- THE WEEK, Page 22WORLDBoris Barks Back
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- Yeltsin moves to fend off Russia's increasingly hostile Old
- Guard
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- When in danger of attack, strike first! That's the message
- Russian President Boris Yeltsin sent as he went on the offensive
- against hard-line political opponents, banning a new
- conservative group pledged to remove him from office and
- ordering the dissolution of an opposition-controlled security
- force. Citing "great danger" and accusing the group of
- "destabilizing society," Yeltsin outlawed the week-old National
- Salvation Front, a mixture of militant nationalists and Old
- Guard communists, who are determined to slow economic reforms
- and oust the President. The front vowed to defy Yeltsin's ban.
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- The crackdown followed weeks of criticism of Yeltsin's
- reform policies and reflects the Kremlin's general nervousness
- in the run-up to the December session of the Congress of
- People's Deputies, where the dominant communists plan to seek
- the government's resignation and a curb on free-market reforms.
- In his other show of clout, Yeltsin chose to disband a
- 5,000-strong police force controlled by one of his major rivals,
- legislative speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov. Ironically, the
- so-called Cardinal's Guard was originally formed to protect the
- Russian legislative building after last year's failed coup.
- Yeltsin began calling the force an "illegal armed unit" after
- it was deployed at the offices of the newspaper Izvestia -- once
- the official Soviet mouthpiece but today a Yeltsin bastion whose
- ownership is at the center of a dispute among hard-line
- lawmakers, the government and the newspaper's own staff.
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