President Boris Yeltsin carried through his threat to outlaw the hard-line National Salvation Front on Wednesday, issuing a decree to crack down on all extremist groups that aim to distabilize the country.


Yeltsin's press service said he signed the decree "acting as the guarantor of democracy and the basic freedoms of Russian citizens", Itar-Tass reported.


The Security Ministry - the domestic wing of the former KGB - the Prosecutor General and Interior and Justice Ministries were authorized to use the "strictest measures" to cut short the front's operations and disband its organizing committee.


They were also to take action against any other "extremist groups and elements openly pursuing the goals of destabilization in society", according to Itar-Tass.


Yeltsin had threatened on Tuesday


to prohibit the front, which is a coalition of nationalist and pro-Communist movements dedicated to the president's removal from office. The movements held their inaugural meeting last weekend.


The front's organizers published a statement on Tuesday in which they called Yeltsin's decree "anti-constitutional" and urged members to continue to pursue the goals set out at last Saturday's congress.


Yeltsin's decision came among other signs that he has decided to take a generally tougher line against his political opposition, including the parliament. The legislature is locked with him in a battle over the ownership of Izvestia, one of Russia's largest dailies, and is likely to challenge his extensive powers at the winter session of the Congress of People's Deputies on Dec. 1.


On Wednesday, Deputy Prime Minister Valery Makharadze said that if Yeltsin deemed it necessary to implement presidential rule, most regions would support him.


Grigory Yavlinsky, formerly one of Mikhail Gorbachev's economics advisers and co-author of the famous 500 day plan, weighed in against all of the politicians in an open letter published by Rossiiskaya Gazeta on Wednesday.


The letter, titled "The people will not like tomorrow", said that economic collapse was inevitable regardless of who ran the country, while the squabbles among the leaders in Moscow were diverting attention from the real, economic, problems.


"In these conditions truly serious provocations could take place with heavy consequences in Moscow that could push the whole country toward collapse and confrontation", Yavinsky said in the letter.


Several Western political analysts said Wednesday that the latest Kremlin decisions were worrying, but they were unsure of quite what it is they should be worried by.


None believed that Yeltsin's resort to the hardball politics of the stereotypical Russian leader meant that a coup, dictatorship, martial law or any other apocalyptic turn of events was around the corner.


But they were unsettled by the perception that Yeltsin was responding to rising chaos within the structures of government.


"It is the lack of control over government that disturbs me in all this", said one Western diplomat.


She felt that Yeltsin was now making a public show of cracking down primarily because the old centers of power such as the former KGB and the parliament, which was elected under the old regime, now seemed to be regaining confidence in their strength to act as they please.


"The resurgence of groups like Pamyat, too, coinciding with the parliament being not just fractious but passing some fairly nasty laws, is good reason for Yeltsin to worry", she said.


Another diplomat made a distinction between Yeltsin's decision to disband the White House Guard and to outlaw the National Salvation Front.


"He has a solid constitutional basis


for dissolving the guard", said the diplomat, "But in outlawing the front he is on much shakier ground".


But the diplomat, a political attache, believed that despite his gestures at the moment, Yeltsin was still trying to choose between a course of confrontation or compromise with the opposition.


"The first option runs anywhere from declaring a state of emergency to calling a referendum to dissolve the Congress of People's Deputies before it meets", said the diplomat.


The second option, compromise, would involve sacrificing the liberal cabinet members in the government of acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar.


For that reason he did not believe the warnings of an impending rightist coup that have issued from those liberal ministers are to be taken seriously. "They have an axe to grind: If Yeltsin compromises, they lose their jobs".