THE RUSSIAN communist leader, Mr Gennady Zyuganov, yesterday called on President Yeltsin to resign, claiming that the cover up of his heart attack in the final days of the election campaign amounted to fraud. "The elections were not fair." Mr Zyuganov said.
His call was backed by Mr Gennady Seleznov, the communist speaker of the state Duma, who said Mr Yeltsin should step down, if doctors decided tomorrow that he was too ill to operate on.
When parliament meets next week, the communist faction, the largest in the Duma, has promised to put on the agenda a long standing project for a medical commission to judge the fitness of the president and all top state figures.
Both statements were ignored on the state run media and official news agencies, as the Kremlin maintained a complete silence about the medical crisis for the second day running.
No one in power has commented on the revelation made four days ago by Professor Renat Akchurin, the surgeon nominated to perform heart bypass surgery, that the president had a heart whose tissue was damaged by a recent heart attack, just before the second round of elections in July. There has been a further report that Mr Yeltsin suffered a stroke and could work for only 15 minutes a day.
Instead, minor presidential spokesmen have commented that everything was proceeding as normal. A spokesman for the presidential press service said: "The only thing I can tell you is that Michael DeBakey has arrived."
The US cardiologist and father of the bypass technique has been asked by the Kremlin to act as an adviser to the surgical team. An international congress on the history of cardio vascular surgery opens in Moscow today, and in the absence of official information from the Kremlin, the international surgeons are due to hold a press conference.
Tomorrow the "collegium" of Russian heart specialists meets to decide on whether to operate on Mr Yeltsin. Little is known of how they will come to their decision or to whom these doctors are responsible. They too are due to hold a press conference after their decision has been made.
The split among the Kremlin doctors widened when Professor Akchurin publicly criticised the medical team responsible for the president's day today health, in particular for letting Mr Yeltsin shoot and hunt at his lodge in Zavidovo with the German Chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl.
"I saw Boris Nikolayevich two or three weeks ago. We have looked at results of his Zavidovo period. I cannot say I was too pleased with these results. He was tiring himself, hunting, fishing. This is not something we can recommend for this sort of patient."
While the medical decision to postpone the operation for up to two months may appear already quite clear to Professor Akchurin, the political consequences of being ruled by a lame duck president are not. Unless the doctors come out with a clear statement, pressure will go on Mr Yeltsin to sign a decree handing over all his powers to his Prime Minister, Mr Viktor Chernomyrdin.
An opinion poll published yesterday in Izvestia found that 75 per cent of those asked believed that Mr Yeltsin was not in control of his job.
Nuala Haughey reports:
The problems facing Russia's top heart surgeons of whether or not to operate on Mr Yeltsin are similar to those regularly faced by most Irish surgeons, the director of the National Cardiac Surgical Unit in the Mater Hospital said yesterday.
Mr Maurice Neligan said in all cases where heart surgery is contemplated, there is "heart searching and weighing the risks against the benefits and discussing it with the patient and the family".
Mr Neligan said Mr Yeltsin's doctors are likely to be optimising his condition and getting him as fit as possible" following his reported heart attack in late June or early July.
He said about 30 per cent of heart bypass patients would have had previous heart attacks which damage the heart muscle.
Mr Aonghus O'Donnell, a consultant cardiothoracic surgeon based in Cork University Hospital, while he would not comment on Mr Yeltsin's case said it is not uncommon for patients in their sixth decade to have bypass surgery. Patients in their 70s and 80s have survived such operations.
"The risk of dying or having an operative complication are very much dependent on patient specific factors but these would form part of a routine pre operative evaluation of every patient," he said.
Heart bypass surgery is performed on around 2,000 patients in Ireland every year. The mortality rate associated with the surgery ranges from about 2 to 5 per cent.