Boiling water -- and not a brewing plot -- made the telephone lines of top cabinet officials go dead over the weekend, a government spokesman said Wednesday.


On Friday, the day that an anonymous note circulated in parliament alleging that aides to President Boris Yeltsin were planning a coup, the assistants of Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and his team were unable to call out from their offices in the White House.


"I kept getting a busy signal, but people could call me," said Valery Vorontsov, press secretary to Deputy Prime Minister Yury Yarov, who is in charge of social affairs.


News of the phone outage raised eyebrows among some journalists who remembered Sept. 21, 1993, the day Yeltsin had all phone lines cut off in the White House, then home to the rebellious Supreme Soviet. The move, which followed Yeltsin's decision to dissolve parliament, ended in bloody fighting that left the White House a smoking ruin.


After suppressing the uprising, Yeltsin had the White House repaired and handed it over to Chernomyrdin's government. The new parliament got temporary housing in a smaller office building that faces the White House.


Asked about the latest phone outage, a government spokesman, Valery Grishin, angrily denied rumors that the lines had been switched off.


He said that a hot-water pipe had burst and flooded the outgoing lines, and that repairmen were pumping out the water.


Vorontsov and Yury Mikhailov, press secretary for First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets, shrugged off the whole affair.


By Monday, many calls were already going through, Mikhailov said, adding that he had managed to make nearly all his calls without a hitch by Tuesday morning.


But the White House press service said Wednesday that they could still not get through to the outside world.


"I tried half an hour ago, but I still can't get out," a spokeswoman said -- when a reporter called her.


The special government telephones called vertushki, which directly link top officials via special lines, worked fine throughout the weekend, said Mikhailov. Ministers and their top assistants all have at least one of the special phones.