MOSCOW : Down to Basics

President Boris N. Yeltsin has summoned 350 delegates to the Russian capital Saturday to adopt the country’s first post-Communist Constitution. They are to debate his draft favoring a strong presidency and free-market reform for the next 18 days.

Claiming that Russia’s first democratically elected leader will try to steamroller his proposal into law and make himself a dictator, Communists and allied ultra-nationalists have called their own one-day “constitutional assembly” two days earlier.

Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, speaker of the Parliament and Yeltsin’s chief opponent, plans to use the one-day assembly to rally support for a rival constitutional draft that will be put before Yeltsin’s delegates. It more closely resembles the Soviet-era Constitution that gave supreme power to the legislature.