Russia's intelligence and law-enforcement agencies said Wednesday they would question top officials named in a document that set out an alleged plot by top officials to oust President Boris Yeltsin.


Mikhail Avdyukov, an official at the Prosecutor's Office told the newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta that "we will have to question everyone who is mentioned, whatever their post or position."


The document, which was distributed in parliament and published over the weekend in a Moscow newspaper, named such senior figures as First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets and Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov as coconspirators in the alleged coup.


Both have publicly dismissed the purported plot as "nonsense."


Alexander Mikhailov, press secretary of the Federal Counterintelligence Service, the successor to the KGB, said in a telephone interview that his organization and the Interior Ministry were beginning a joint enquiry with the Public Prosecutor's office into the provenance of the document.


He said his service had acquired a copy of the document "several days" before it was published in the newspaper Obshchaya Gazeta last weekend, and had concluded it was a forgery.


Mikhailov said the counterintelligence service had informed the Russian leadership about the document, which was entitled "Version No. 1."


He also criticized Obshchaya Gazeta for printing it.


"If I hear a piece of gossip on the tram do you think I should print it in an edition of a million copies and then announce that it's only gossip?" he asked.


Mikhailov later told NTV television that he had received another document entitled "Version No. 2," which contained a scenario like the first one.


Yeltsin has been on an unscheduled vacation in the Black Sea resort of Sochi since March 14 amid rumors of ill health. Official news agencies have carried repeated assurances of the president's good health in recent days; there were no such reports on Wednesday.


Some observers believe that the coup document was released to drive a wedge between government and president. Others have suggested the document was aimed at provoking the parliament to call for early presidential elections.


The predominantly anti-Yeltsin lower house, the State Duma, Wednesday reprieved the government from a potentially awkward motion of no-confidence with only 81 of the Duma's 444 deputies voting to put the motion on the parliamentary agenda; 106 voted against, with a further 106 abstaining. The wide margin with which the Duma rejected discussing the motion suggested a lack of animosity to the government of Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, in contrast to parliament's aggressive stance towards Yeltsin.


"Some people were afraid," Igor Muravyov, author of the motion, said in an interview after the vote, adding that "the results will be different when deputies come back from their districts" after the next parliamentary recess.


Muravyov, 33, a member of the centrist faction New Regional Policy in the Duma, singled out the failure of its economic policies as his main spur to table the motion.


Opposition deputies have been calling on the government to adopt an "anti-crisis program" and pay off its debts to industry.


But, with the exception of the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the opposition has been more muted in its criticisms of the government since the resignations of monetarist reformers Yegor Gaidar and Boris Fyodorov.


Former Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, who was released from prison last month after a parliamentary amnesty, offered his own theory on the alleged coup plot in an article published Wednesday in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine.


In the article, entitled "Is Russia threatened by civil war?", Rutskoi accused reformist politicians of "trying to frighten the West" in order "to obtain unconditional support for the regime and the policy of 'reforms' which has collapsed," Rutskoi wrote.


Rutskoi, who has said he is set to run for president, recently joined a new opposition movement, Accord for Russia.