Boris Barks Back

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.

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.