Hard-Liners Heckle Yeltsin at Celebration

MOSCOW — Communists heckled Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin during celebrations Saturday to mark Nazi Germany’s defeat in World War II.

In Moscow’s Gorky Park, where Yeltsin was at first warmly greeted at a gathering of veterans, several hundred Communists approached him and started shouting “Down with Yeltsin” and “Yeltsin out.”

Although protected by dozens of guards and police, Yeltsin walked back to his car, pursued by shouting opponents, witnesses said.

The Communists accuse Yeltsin’s democratic reformers of betraying the Soviet Union, which collapsed last year after an unsuccessful coup against then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

“Forty-seven years on, our treacherous authorities have fulfilled Hitler’s ambition. The Soviet Union is destroyed,” read a leaflet issued by the group Laboring Russia, which has taken up the banner of the banned Communist Party.