YELTSIN AIDE RULES OUT USE OF FORCE AS RESPONSE TO DUMA VOTE.

President Boris Yeltsin’s security advisor, Yuri Baturin, has denied reports that a March 18 meeting of the Russian Security Council reacted to the Duma’s call for the restoration of the USSR by making contingency plans to impose a state of emergency, dissolve the Duma, and outlaw the Communist party. Interviewed on Russia’s Independent Television March 24, Baturin said there was no truth in the reports, which were first carried last week by the nationalist newspaper Zavtra (No. 12). Picked up over the weekend by other Russian newspapers, the reports identified Baturin as the drafter of a packet of presidential decrees to put the plan into operation. Zavtra claimed that the March 18 meeting was chaired by Yeltsin and that only objections put forward by Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov dissuaded the president from resorting to force. Yeltsin allegedly backed off in the face of Kulikov’s insistence that the armed forces, bogged down in Chechnya, could not