Banned Party Reinstated By Russian High Court Liberal Reform Party Will Compete In December Election

Russia’s Supreme Court ended a weeklong political drama Saturday by ordering that the reformist movement headed by liberal economist Grigory A. Yavlinsky be allowed to compete in Dec. 17 parliamentary elections.

The refusal last week by the Central Elections Commission to register the popular Yabloko bloc had been condemned by democracy proponents throughout Russia as a blatant attempt by those loyal to President Boris N. Yeltsin to manipulate the elections.

Yabloko and the charismatic Yavlinsky are likely to draw away much of the centrist vote that might otherwise go to the movement called Our Home Is Russia that is headed by Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin and openly aligned with Yeltsin, who is hospitalized with a heart ailment.

“There is, after all, some hope for democracy in Russia,” Yavlinsky, 43, said as he left the courtroom where his appeal for registration was approved after two days of review.

Commission Chairman Nikolai T. Ryabov announced Oct. 29 that Yabloko had been disqualified because it had dropped candidates from its list of potential deputies after collecting endorsement signatures. The same procedural technicality was used to bar another Yeltsin rival, the Derzhava party of Alexander V. Rutskoi, the former vice president and 1993 coup leader.

The elimination of Yabloko had prompted another prominent reform candidate, former Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar, to threaten a boycott of the December vote unless the decision was rescinded.

Gaidar warned that exclusion of a leading democratic movement would relegate the elections to “a dangerous farce.”

As popular outrage mounted over the commission’s actions, Yeltsin weighed in from his hospital bed Tuesday to demand an explanation from Ryabov as to why he had refused to register Yabloko and Derzhava. The presidential news service later said Yeltsin was satisfied that legal procedures were being followed with the appeals for Supreme Court review.

On Friday, the high court ordered the registration of Derzhava, or the Great Power party, but said it needed more time to consider the appeal of Yabloko, which means “apple” in Russian but is actually an acronym composed from the names of the movement’s three founders. The ruling in Yavlinsky’s favor late Saturday was made without explanation.